Six Years Later: March 19 - Shock & Awe (aka The Beginning of the End)

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Iraq - A New Scandal : "Current" Affairs !

US Zerocracy in IRAQ


July 15, 2011

Majid Abdul-Kader, Baghdad Alarabiya News  / Alwaleed Online News

The latest statement of the Minister of Treasury in Iraq Rafie Al-Esawi has raised alot of controversy within the Iraqi community. In his statement he confirmed that the total expenditure employed in restructuring the electric grid since 2003 is "enough to buy each Iraqi family a fully furnished apartment in the most luxurious european resorts !!".

Rafie Al-Esawi

Al-Esawi declared that a total of 107 Billion Dollars was spent on the electricity sector by the successive Iraqi governments since 2003. And according to economists , if these funds were employed in an honest and sound manner , Iraq's situation today would be totally different.



An economist stated to AlArabiya News that with this amount of money Iraqis could :

- Reconstruct The Grand Fao Port and Al-Jaff river

- Solve the housing crisis all over Iraq .

- Build factories all over Iraq .

- Cover and maintain the green areas all over Iraq .

- With this money Iraq could own several companies : (Siemens Electronic, Mitsubishi Power and General Electric Company).

Iraqs' expenditure on electricity sector alone exceeds the budgets of many countries, while in fact all of the important sectors in Iraq are still lagging behind such as industry, agriculture and transportation in addition to education, which has long characterized the Iraq and the Iraqis in history.



So far , Iraqi citizens are not convinced that a very rich country such as Iraq is unable to solve the electricity crisis that is years long and which has consumed an unbelievable amount of money , an amount that is equal to the budget of 20 years of a country like Bahrain !
And the corruption issues continue in the electricity sector , Alwaleed Online News has revealed this month a major case where the corrupt Iraqi government has signed fake contracts which equal 2 Billion Dollars.



107 Billion Dollars has vanished, and Iraqis continue to live in the dark.
This is how the occupation backed governments function !
Source

http://zerocracy.blogspot.com/2011/07/new-scandal-of-corrupt-iraqi-government.html
 

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Confessions of A Veteran of The Iraq War: The Real Terrorism Is ......


US Zerocracy in IRAQ


July 15, 2011

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79625&hd=&size=1&l=e



Testimonies of Mike Prysner , a soldier returning from Iraq , who is ashamed of being a part of the American occupation of Iraq ..


He has testified that :

" Racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation"

"The Real Terrorist is this Occupation "

"Racism is a vital weapon employed by the US government"

"Poor and working people of the US are sent to kill poor and working people in another country, to make the Rich Richer , and without racism , soldiers will realize that they have in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the Billionaires who send them to WAR "

America you have to wake up and realize that , Your enemies are not 5000 miles away from you , your enemies are your greedy and criminal polititians , your corrupt government , and if you get organised and fight with your brothers and sisters , you can stop this war , you can stop this government , and you can create a better world ..

America, Stand Against Your Government Crimes in The Name of Democracy ..

America , Withdraw Your Troops Out of Iraq ...

WATCH VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LANwAR0c5Ao


Source

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LANwAR0c5Ao&feature=player_embedded

 

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Iraq snapshot - July 15, 2011

The Common Ills



Friday, July 15, 2011.  Chaos and violence continue, the US military announces another death, peaceful protesters are again arrested, Human Rights Watch expresses concern over a 'speech' proposal in Iraq, and more.
 
 http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2011/07/iraq-snapshot_15.html

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Elite units under an office of Maliki's linked to secret jail where detainees face torture, Iraq officials say

by Ned Parker

Iraqi legislators and security officials have been joined by the Red Cross in expressing concern about the Green Zone facility, called Camp Honor, where torture to extract confessions is alleged


July 15, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-prison-20110715,0,790079,full.story

Reporting from Baghdad—

Elite units controlled by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's military office are ignoring members of parliament and the government's own directive by operating a clandestine jail in Baghdad's Green Zone where prisoners routinely face torture to extract confessions, Iraqi officials say.

Iraqi legislators and security officials have been joined by the International Committee of the Red Cross in expressing concern about the facility, called Camp Honor. In a confidential letter to the prime minister, the Red Cross requested immediate access to the jail and added that there could be three more connected to it where detainees also are being mistreated.

Iraq's Justice Ministry ordered Camp Honor shut down in March after parliament's human rights committee toured the center and said it had uncovered evidence of torture. The Human Rights Ministry denied Wednesday that it was still in operation. But several Iraqi officials familiar with the site said that anywhere from 60 to 120 people have been held there since it was ordered closed.

Allegations that the jail has continued to function are likely to launch a fresh debate about the breadth of powers belonging to Maliki and his closest associates. The jail falls under the prime minister's Office of the Commander in Chief, which supervises a vast military and security apparatus.

Maliki supporters say he is committed to protecting human rights, but needs broad powers to navigate a treacherous domestic environment. The prime minister, a Shiite Muslim, is reluctant to loosen his grip on the army, police and his elite combat units, believing that any compromise would make it easier for opponents to organize a coup or political conspiracy, or would allow armed Shiite and Sunni Muslim groups to gain strength.

Maliki also has refused to permit his main political rival, the Iraqiya bloc led by Iyad Allawi, to choose the next defense minister, in defiance of an understanding on division of authority that took months to hammer out after inconclusive elections in March 2010. The position has remained vacant, with Maliki filling it for now.

The agreement also called for all security forces to be removed from the prime minister's office and restored to the normal chain of command. But the protracted negotiations over who should hold the key defense and interior ministries, which could stretch into next year, have allowed Maliki to preserve his authority.

The dispute over who directs Iraq's security forces is fueling a sense of drift as tens of thousands of U.S. troops prepare to leave Iraq. U.S. forces ended combat operations last year, and the remaining 46,000 troops are to leave by the end of this year. The United States has offered to keep some troops in Iraq after that deadline to help ensure stability, but that requires Iraqi consent, which is far from certain.

Adnan Assadi, a member of the prime minister's political coalition who serves as deputy interior minister, said in an interview that it was vital for Maliki to maintain control of Iraq's security because he will be blamed for any failures.

"The ministries of Defense and Interior are like the right and left hand for the commander in chief," Assadi said.

Until the inspection in March, the Camp Honor jail had illustrated the prime minister's supremacy on security matters. He has faced complaints since 2008 about his control of the U.S.-trained counter-terrorism service and a security force known as the Baghdad Brigade, or Brigade 56. The units possessed their own jails, investigative judges and interrogators, answering only to the prime minister's military office.

Critics say that many of those jailed by the forces are locked up for political reasons, because of personal feuds or to cover up corruption. But because of the opaque nature of the security forces and the jails they run, it is difficult to determine whether that is true.

The prime minister's military office promised reforms when, in April 2010, it was found to be running a separate secret jail in western Baghdad, where more than 400 inmates had been held for months. But nothing changed at Camp Honor, where family members and attorneys were barred from seeing detainees and allegations of torture were rampant.

Lawmakers, security officials and the Red Cross letter expressed deep concern that despite parliament's success in extracting the pledge to close Camp Honor, people were still being imprisoned there.

Detainees "are still being held by the counter-terrorism center or Brigade 56 in the same location they declared was shut down," said Salim Abdullah Jabouri, the head of parliament's human rights committee. "These people are held 30-50 days. After they have obtained confessions, the detainee is transferred to Rusafa with his confession," he added, referring to one of Baghdad's main detention facilities.

The people in Maliki's military office haven't changed their practices, said a second member of parliament, who spoke on condition of anonymity so he could comment freely. "They have more power. They have more prisoners. They are holding them in the IZ," the Green Zone, said the lawmaker, a prominent member of the Iraqiya bloc. "This is the reality."

Jabouri said he became aware of the detentions after he started looking for a leader of the Sunni Awakening movement who had helped U.S. troops fight Islamic extremists in northern Iraq.

Jabouri said he received a phone call about three weeks ago from the man, who said he had been transferred to a regular jail after he was tortured in the Green Zone facility and confessed to being a member of the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq and of a wing of the late dictator Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

As many as 120 detainees had been through the secret jail since March, Jabouri said. Most of the cases he knew of involved prisoners from provinces with large Sunni populations, where security forces regularly carry out raids looking for Islamic militants and members of the former Baath Party.

The Red Cross said in its May 22 letter that detainees whom it interviewed after they had been transferred out of the facility reported beatings, electric shock to the genitals and other parts of the body, suffocation using plastic bags, scalding with boiling water or burning with cigarettes, being hung from ceilings with hands tied behind the back or being hung upside down from the top frame of a bunk bed, the pulling out of fingernails, being left naked for hours and rape using sticks or bottles.

Detainees also alleged that female family members were brought to Camp Honor and raped in front of them, the Red Cross said.

A security official confirmed that detainees were guarded at Camp Honor by the Baghdad Brigade, probably in a building that can hold up to 60 or 70 prisoners that had been used previously to hide detainees when inspectors came to the base.

Government spokesman Ali Dabbagh referred questions about the facility to the Human Rights Ministry, where officials insisted that it had been shut down. "Absolutely, it is closed," said ministry official Kamal Amin.

Supporters say Maliki shouldn't be held responsible for abuses by people within the ranks of the security forces.

"Maliki has given very tough directions to respect human rights," said lawmaker Ali Alaq, a senior member of the prime minister's Islamic Dawa Party. "I know the leaders in the Office [of the Commander in Chief] are accurate and professional, but you know sometimes there are forces who say they belong to this office and do really bad things. Sometimes they are even connected to terrorist groups."

The Red Cross letter to the Iraqi government said the organization was "seriously worried regarding the possibility that the interrogations are continuing in Camp Honor."

The letter, shown to The Times by an Iraqi source, cited what it called credible allegations that three other secret facilities existed in the Green Zone, which it said were still being used "to hide and hold detainees when committees visit the main prison." It said one was near the counter-terrorism service's headquarters and that the two others were known as the Flag and Five Star.

The Red Cross declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the letter because of its policy of not discussing publicly its detainee inspections or correspondence with governments.

The letter said the Red Cross had visited Camp Honor last December but was forced to leave after less than two hours. It said its teams, which included medical personnel, gained information about the facility by interviewing detainees around the country at prisons and detention centers where they had been transferred.

The interviews, done at different times and places, "show that [the detainees] were exposed to systematic mistreatment during their detention in Camp Honor that reached the level of torture due to its severity and the goal of it to extract confessions or information."

Detainees reported that investigative judges were present during interrogation sessions in which they were mistreated, the letter said. It also said the Red Cross was concerned that the tactics were still being used and asked for full access to the facility and all detainees held there.

- ned.parker@latimes.com

Source

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-prison-20110715,0,790079,full.story


 

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Iraq snapshot - July 19, 2011



The Common Ills



Tuesday, July 19, 2011.  Chaos and violence continue, Amnesty International calls for executions in Iraq to be put on hold, Nouri al-Maliki is wanted before a Spanish court, Iran boast of their invasion of Iraq, Senator Patty Murray takes to the Senate floor to note the needs of veterans and argue that the country has a debt to pay which cannot be forgotten, and more.

http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2011/07/iraq-snapshot_19.html







 

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1 Million Dead in Iraq?

6 Reasons the Media Hide the True Human Toll of War -- And Why We Let Them

Most Americans turn a blind eye to the violent acts being carried out in their name.

By John Tirman

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28632.htm

July 20, 2011 "Alternet" - - As the U.S. war in Iraq winds down, we are entering a familiar phase, the season of forgetting—forgetting the harsh realities of the war. Mostly we forget the victims of the war, the Iraqi civilians whose lives and society have been devastated by eight years of armed conflict. The act of forgetting is a social and political act, abetted by the American news media. Throughout the war, but especially now, the minimal news we get from Iraq consistently devalues the death toll of Iraqi civilians.
Why? A number of reasons are at work in this persistent evasion of reality. But forgetting has consequences, especially as it braces the obstinate right-wing narrative of “victory” in the Iraq war. If we forget, we learn nothing.

I’ve puzzled over this habit of reaching for the lowest possible estimates of the number of Iraqis who died unnecessarily since March 2003. The habit is now deeply entrenched. Over a period of about two weeks in May, I encountered in major news media three separate references to the number of people who had died in the Iraq war. Anderson Cooper, on his CNN show, Steven Lee Myers in the New York Times Magazine and Brian MacQuarrie in the Boston Globe all pegged the number in the tens of thousands, sometimes adding “at least.” But the number that sticks is this “tens of thousands.”

Cooper, Myers and MacQuarrie—all skillful reporters—are scarcely alone. It’s very rare to hear anything approximating the likely death toll, which is well into the hundreds of thousands, possibly more than one million. It‘s a textbook case of how opinion gatekeepers reinforce each other’s caution. Because the number of civilians killed in a U.S. war is so morally fraught, the news media, academics and political leaders tend to gravitate toward the figure (if mentioned at all) that is least disturbing.

The “tens of thousands” mantra is peculiar because even the most conservative calculation—that provided by Iraq Body Count, a British NGO—is now more than 100,000, and IBC acknowledges that their number is probably about half correct. They count only civilians killed by violence who are named in English-language news and some morgue counts. Their method is incomplete for a number of reasons—news media coverage is far from comprehensive, most obviously—and many Iraqis who are killed are not labeled by authorities as civilians. The death toll from nonviolent deaths (women dying in childbirth, for example, because the health care system has been devastated by the war) is also very high and is not included in IBC’s tally.

The more accurate figures come from household surveys and other methods, and these have much higher figures. I commissioned one conducted by Johns Hopkins scientists in 2006 that yielded a figure of 650,000, which was hotly disputed, but another around the same time yielded a total of more than 400,000 dead, including all Iraqis from all causes. Both surveys followed state-of-the-art epidemiological practice. And a lot of killing was still to come after those surveys were done.

There is a lively debate among specialists about these figures, but the bottom line is that “hundreds of thousands” rather than “tens of thousands” is the incontrovertible mortality statistic.

So why the devotion to the lower number? And why does it matter?

The latter question is the easier one to answer. Make the rounds of right-wing blogs and think tanks and you’ll find a constant refrain: the war, despite its many difficulties, was worth it to get rid of Saddam Hussein. As Richard Miniter of the Hudson Institute put it last September, “The death tolls in the Saddam years were far higher than in the years following liberation; hundreds of thousands disappeared into mass graves.“

Such a comparison is only possible if mere “tens of thousands” perished in the war. If the human costs are calculated to be relatively low, then the next war is all the easier to start.

But what the right-wing triumphalists assert does not explain why the elite media bury the mortality issue. A half-dozen reasons explain their indifference to accurate reporting.

First, many of these news outlets had endorsed the war and never quite recanted. Even if a newspaper did admit to a mistake in judgment about the war, acknowledging that you’ve been hoodwinked by the Bush administration and then seeing that error magnified by 5 million refugees and perhaps a million dead is a hard pill to swallow.

Second, the Bush White House worked overtime to decry any of the high estimates, and the Murdoch media machine did its part in attempting to discredit the household surveys in particular. The reaction to the Johns Hopkins estimate of 650,000 “excess deaths” came in for savage treatment, trashed as a “political hit” in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. This campaign against the scientists had a chilling effect.

Third, journalists have rarely if ever engaged the technical debate about estimating casualties, preferring to report mortality—if at all—as a political story. The science is complicated, to be sure, but accessible. The epidemiologists who are thoroughly conversant with the most advanced techniques of estimating fatalities come down squarely on the side of the household surveys and the higher numbers.

Journalism in the Iraq war tended to focus on the Bush administration’s foibles and the chaotic political wrangling in Baghdad. The attention to civilians and the violence of the war quickly fell into a few reliable tropes: the Shia-Sunni fratricide, spectacular car bombs rather than the quotidian reality of violence, Baghdad-centric reporting (because it was too dangerous to travel), and any glimpse of progress on the ground. While Iraqis were reporting (through blogs and polling) that 80 percent of the violence was due to the U.S. military and the conditions of life were intolerable, this perspective rarely found its way into major news media in the United States.

Fourth, the political establishment, including the Democratic leadership, would not touch this issue, and the news media was left without an opposition voice. The implication of so many deaths, a large fraction by the hands of U.S. soldiers, was politically a third rail. For many reasons—not least the hunger for heroes in the aftermath of 9/11—the troops have been accorded nearly unprecedented adulation, and such heroes cannot be accused of excessive use of force. So politicians have steered clear, and the rare one who did raise a question, such as the late, pro-military congressman John Murtha, were mercilessly attacked.

Fifth is the troubling matter of racism. The major U.S. wars since 1945 have been waged in Asia, and a certain “orientalism”—not unique to Americans, of course—has framed our perceptions of the local populations. How much a factor this is in ignoring the suffering of these populations is very difficult to gauge (about 1.5 million Korean civilians were killed in the Korean war, and between one and two million Vietnamese, and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, in America’s Indochina war, all largely disregarded). But racism surely accounts for some of the cavalier disrespect the public and press show toward the civilian suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The sixth and last explanation for indifference—and perhaps the most powerful—is a psychological one. We tend to avert our eyes from gruesome spectacle; it disrupts our sense of an orderly, just world. We want to believe that the mayhem is not happening, that in the end everything will be all right, or that the victims are to blame. These kinds of reactions—demonstrated time and again in clinical experiments by social psychologists—are reflected in society and also in the news media.

The Korean war is often called the “forgotten war”; it is not literally forgotten, but avoided. The enormous destruction without a clear and satisfying result for America led rapidly to public indifference. That, I think, is what’s occurred in Iraq—a falsely premised war with enormous devastation leads to a vast carelessness. And the civilians, the real victims, are the most disregarded of all.

Contrast the news coverage of Iraq with the summer 2006 war in Lebanon, when Israel bombed neighborhoods in Beirut that resulted in more than 1,000 Lebanese deaths in the 34-day conflict. However laudable the extensive news interest in that toll, such attention was significantly greater than the coverage of civilian killings in Iraq, which approached that figure in any single day that bloody summer. Why attention to one and not the other? A plausible explanation is that the Lebanon war was not a U.S. operation. We were not responsible (directly), and hence discussing the human toll was not out-of-bounds.

“When the New Republic ran a column by a private that recounted several instances of bad behavior by U.S. soldiers,” media critic Michael Massing recalled, writing about Iraq, “he and the magazine were viciously attacked by conservative bloggers. Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name, and this serves as a powerful deterrent to editors and producers.”

And there’s the rub. We simply don’t want to know: it’s too upsetting, too much to absorb. This is not behavior limited to journalists; many academics and NGOs who should know better do the same thing. Because they generally sympathize with the downtrodden of the third world, their indifference is all the more disquieting.

But the major news media enjoy influence that few institutions possess, and with that have a responsibility to be more comprehensive, more energetic, in getting and presenting the full scope of war. Missing the WMD story before the war has been the focus of press criticism. But the bigger failure—the more consequential failure—is neglecting the fate of the people subjected to the U.S. occupation. And once all the American troops are withdrawn, the season of forgetting will be in full flower.

John Tirman is executive director of MIT's Center for International Studies. His new book, "The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars," was released July 7, 2011 by Oxford Press.

 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28632.htm

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Iraq snapshot - July 20, 2011



The Common Ills



Wednesday, July 20, 2011.  Chaos and violence continue, Ad Melkert 'brief's the UN Security Council on Iraq, Ad Melkert 'mistates' (lies) repeatedly, Jalal Talabani orders a vice president to sign off on the execution orders (his hands are clean!), Senator Patty Murray leads the fight for Vietnam veterans suffering from the effects of Agent Orange, and more.
 

http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2011/07/iraq-snapshot_20.html

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'Progress' in Iraq


The Common Ills

July 20, 2011

http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2011/07/progress-in-iraq.html

Al Mada reports that Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq, authorized Tareq al-Hashemi, one of Iraq's two vice presidents, to sign off on death sentences from the Iraqi judiciary and begin the process of waiting for the Ministry of Justice to issue a decree on the execution of five members of the previous regime in Iraq. Dar Addustour also reports Talabani authorized al-Hashemi to sign the death sentences.

If you're not getting why that's news -- you may actually read as opposed to skimming Newser and other superficial sites which repeatedly 'discover' Talabani's 'opposition' to the death penalty and applaud his 'brave' stance. His opposition isn't to the death penalty, it's to his signing off on it. So he orders others to sign the orders. And repeatedly -- check last November -- gets praised for his 'brave' stand by people who don't understand what the hell they're writing about. He's the President of Iraq. If he wanted to end the death penalty, he could refuse to sign off on the orders and he could insist that the vice presidents do as well. Instead, people have been put to death repeatedly throughout the two terms Jalal has been president. People were still executed but Jalal didn't have to get his hands dirty or fight for a supposed belief and so many ill informed and uninformed enabled him in that.

In other news, Al Sabaah reports that Parliament has formed a committee to investigate what some Iraqis are calling a US helicopter attack in Hilla on a plot of land planted with grain. The US did whatever it was doing -- still to be determined, hence the formation of the committee -- on Sunday and Monday and Monday evening is accused of opening fire on the agricultural area.

Meanwhile the United Nations Secretary General's Special Envoy to Iraq Ad Melkert sees 'gains' in Iraq. That's the same Ad Melkert, by the way, whom the Spanish court wants to testify about the April massacre at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. The UN didn't protect the residents of Camp Ashraf. You have to wonder where the progess is that Melkert's seeing. Iraq has entered (political) Stalemate II -- it entered it months ago. But Melkert sees progress. Let's hope he's forced to take the stand and really sweat it out in Spain.


Iraqis who can't find their loved ones wouldn't argue 'progress' in Iraq. At the heart of the protests in Iraq has been the wives, mothers and daughers whose husbands, sons and fathers have disappeared into the Iraqi 'justice' system. Here are some of the women who have taken their cry for help to the Baghdad Friday protests.

Today NPR's Isra' al Rubei'i and Kelly McEvers (Morning Edition) report on the women who take part in the Baghdad protests. (And please note, the women can be found all over Iraq and have been protesting throughout Iraq since January.) They speak with Umm Haidar whose son Haider was taken away by US troops five years ago and she has searched for him ever since, "All I want to know is if my son is dead or alive."

McEvers notes the women say "we've searched the prisons and morgues" and that they come to Baghdad's Tahrir Square "as a last hope." Nouri did come up with a program to help these women back in February, but a soldier states that it was "simply a way to placate" and to defuse the protests. But false arrests are all the rage in Iraq now because you can milk family members out of so much money.



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.


http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2011/07/progress-in-iraq.html
 

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Iraq snapshot - July 21, 2011



The Common Ills


July 21, 2011



Thursday, July 21, 2011.  Chaos and violence continue, Jalal Talabani prepares to host another house party, Political Stalemate II continues, US officials think discussions about the US military staying in Iraq could go on for months, and more.
 

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79808&hd=&size=1&l=e

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Six reasons why Americans don't know a million Iraqis were killed in their name


By John Tirman

July 30, 2011

Why is the fate of people subjected to US invasion and occupation, and the scale of the slaughter inflicted, hidden from Americans?

As the US war in Iraq winds down, we are entering a familiar phase, the season of forgetting—forgetting the harsh realities of the war. Mostly we forget the victims of the war, the Iraqi civilians whose lives and society have been devastated by eight years of armed conflict. The act of forgetting is a social and political act, abetted by the American news media.

Throughout the war, but especially now, the minimal news we get from Iraq consistently devalues the death toll of Iraqi civilians.

Why? A number of reasons are at work in this persistent evasion of reality. But forgetting has consequences, especially as it braces the obstinate right-wing narrative of "victory" in the Iraq war. If we forget, we learn nothing.

I’ve puzzled over this habit of reaching for the lowest possible estimates of the number of Iraqis who died unnecessarily since March 2003. The habit is now deeply entrenched. Over a period of about two weeks in May, I encountered in major news media three separate references to the number of people who had died in the Iraq war. Anderson Cooper, on his CNN show, Steven Lee Myers in the New York Times Magazine and Brian MacQuarrie in the Boston Globe all pegged the number in the tens of thousands, sometimes adding "at least." But the number that sticks is this "tens of thousands."

Cooper, Myers and MacQuarrie—all skillful reporters—are scarcely alone. It’s very rare to hear anything approximating the likely death toll, which is well into the hundreds of thousands, possibly more than one million. It's a textbook case of how opinion gatekeepers reinforce each other’s caution. Because the number of civilians killed in a US war is so morally fraught, the news media, academics and political leaders tend to gravitate toward the figure (if mentioned at all) that is least disturbing.

The "tens of thousands" mantra is peculiar because even the most conservative calculation—that provided by Iraq Body Count, a British NGO—is now more than 100,000, and IBC acknowledges that their number is probably about half correct. They count only civilians killed by violence who are named in English-language news and some morgue counts. Their method is incomplete for a number of reasons—news media coverage is far from comprehensive, most obviously—and many Iraqis who are killed are not labeled by authorities as civilians. The death toll from nonviolent deaths (women dying in childbirth, for example, because the health care system has been devastated by the war) is also very high and is not included in IBC’s tally.

The more accurate figures come from household surveys and other methods, and these have much higher figures. I commissioned one conducted by Johns Hopkins scientists in 2006 that yielded a figure of 650,000, which was hotly disputed, but another around the same time yielded a total of more than 400,000 dead, including all Iraqis from all causes. Both surveys followed state-of-the-art epidemiological practice. And a lot of killing was still to come after those surveys were done.

There is a lively debate among specialists about these figures, but the bottom line is that "hundreds of thousands" rather than "tens of thousands" is the incontrovertible mortality statistic.

So why the devotion to the lower number? And why does it matter?

The latter question is the easier one to answer. Make the rounds of right-wing blogs and think tanks and you’ll find a constant refrain: the war, despite its many difficulties, was worth it to get rid of Saddam Hussein. As Richard Miniter of the Hudson Institute put it last September, "The death tolls in the Saddam years were far higher than in the years following liberation; hundreds of thousands disappeared into mass graves."

Such a comparison is only possible if mere "tens of thousands" perished in the war. If the human costs are calculated to be relatively low, then the next war is all the easier to start.

But what the right-wing triumphalists assert does not explain why the elite media bury the mortality issue. A half-dozen reasons explain their indifference to accurate reporting.

First, many of these news outlets had endorsed the war and never quite recanted. Even if a newspaper did admit to a mistake in judgment about the war, acknowledging that you’ve been hoodwinked by the Bush administration and then seeing that error magnified by 5 million refugees and perhaps a million dead is a hard pill to swallow.

Second, the Bush White House worked overtime to decry any of the high estimates, and the Murdoch media machine did its part in attempting to discredit the household surveys in particular. The reaction to the Johns Hopkins estimate of 650,000 "excess deaths" came in for savage treatment, trashed as a "political hit" in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. This campaign against the scientists had a chilling effect.

Third, journalists have rarely if ever engaged the technical debate about estimating casualties, preferring to report mortality—if at all—as a political story. The science is complicated, to be sure, but accessible. The epidemiologists who are thoroughly conversant with the most advanced techniques of estimating fatalities come down squarely on the side of the household surveys and the higher numbers.

Journalism in the Iraq war tended to focus on the Bush administration’s foibles and the chaotic political wrangling in Baghdad. The attention to civilians and the violence of the war quickly fell into a few reliable tropes: the Shia-Sunni fratricide, spectacular car bombs rather than the quotidian reality of violence, Baghdad-centric reporting (because it was too dangerous to travel), and any glimpse of progress on the ground. While Iraqis were reporting (through blogs and polling) that 80 percent of the violence was due to the US military and the conditions of life were intolerable, this perspective rarely found its way into major news media in the United States.

Fourth, the political establishment, including the Democratic leadership, would not touch this issue, and the news media was left without an opposition voice. The implication of so many deaths, a large fraction by the hands of US soldiers, was politically a third rail. For many reasons—not least the hunger for heroes in the aftermath of 9/11—the troops have been accorded nearly unprecedented adulation, and such heroes cannot be accused of excessive use of force. So politicians have steered clear, and the rare one who did raise a question, such as the late, pro-military congressman John Murtha, were mercilessly attacked.

Fifth is the troubling matter of racism. The major US wars since 1945 have been waged in Asia, and a certain "orientalism"—not unique to Americans, of course—has framed our perceptions of the local populations. How much a factor this is in ignoring the suffering of these populations is very difficult to gauge (about 1.5 million Korean civilians were killed in the Korean war, and between one and two million Vietnamese, and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, in America’s Indochina war, all largely disregarded). But racism surely accounts for some of the cavalier disrespect the public and press show toward the civilian suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The sixth and last explanation for indifference—and perhaps the most powerful—is a psychological one. We tend to avert our eyes from gruesome spectacle; it disrupts our sense of an orderly, just world. We want to believe that the mayhem is not happening, that in the end everything will be all right, or that the victims are to blame. These kinds of reactions—demonstrated time and again in clinical experiments by social psychologists—are reflected in society and also in the news media.

The Korean war is often called the "forgotten war"; it is not literally forgotten, but avoided. The enormous destruction without a clear and satisfying result for America led rapidly to public indifference. That, I think, is what’s occurred in Iraq—a falsely premised war with enormous devastation leads to a vast carelessness. And the civilians, the real victims, are the most disregarded of all.

Contrast the news coverage of Iraq with the summer 2006 war in Lebanon, when Israel bombed neighborhoods in Beirut that resulted in more than 1,000 Lebanese deaths in the 34-day conflict. However laudable the extensive news interest in that toll, such attention was significantly greater than the coverage of civilian killings in Iraq, which approached that figure in any single day that bloody summer. Why attention to one and not the other? A plausible explanation is that the Lebanon war was not a US operation. We were not responsible (directly), and hence discussing the human toll was not out-of-bounds.

"When the New Republic ran a column by a private that recounted several instances of bad behavior by US soldiers," media critic Michael Massing recalled, writing about Iraq, "he and the magazine were viciously attacked by conservative bloggers. Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name, and this serves as a powerful deterrent to editors and producers."

And there’s the rub. We simply don’t want to know: it’s too upsetting, too much to absorb. This is not behavior limited to journalists; many academics and NGOs who should know better do the same thing. Because they generally sympathize with the downtrodden of the third world, their indifference is all the more disquieting.

But the major news media enjoy influence that few institutions possess, and with that have a responsibility to be more comprehensive, more energetic, in getting and presenting the full scope of war. Missing the WMD story before the war has been the focus of press criticism. But the bigger failure—the more consequential failure—is neglecting the fate of the people subjected to the US occupation. And once all the American troops are withdrawn, the season of forgetting will be in full flower.



Source

http://www.alternet.org/story/151703/1_million_dead_in_iraq_6_reasons_the_media_hide_the_true_human_toll_of_war_--_and_why_we_let_them?page=entire


 

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Iraq, U.S. to discuss extended stay for troops


By Ned Parker and Raheem Salman, Los Angeles Times



Baghdad's decision comes on the same day Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, visits Iraq and warns that the U.S. needs to know whether a training mission will proceed.



http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-us-20110803,0,3545876.story

August 3, 2011

Reporting from Baghdad—

The Iraqi government agreed late Tuesday to start negotiations with U.S. officials on whether to authorize the U.S. military to remain in Iraq on a mission training Iraq's security forces after 2011.

The announcement came the same day that Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited the country and warned that Washington needed a clear signal from Iraq about whether it would ask the American military stay on.

Senior Pentagon officials have been imploring Iraq's government for months to make a decision on a continued U.S. military presence, and last month, on a visit to Baghdad, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta expressed that frustration by saying, "Damn it, make a decision," referring to the Iraqis.

As a candidate, President Obama promised to end the Iraq war, so the White House has been reluctant to call openly for U.S. troops to remain.

But the top Pentagon officials generally favor keeping a small U.S. force here, fearing that a complete withdrawal will cause sectarian and ethnic fighting to intensify. Pentagon officials privately acknowledge that having troops in Iraq could also serve to deter neighboring Iran from asserting itself in the region. Mullen warned Tuesday of Iran's ambitions to meddle in Iraq.

Under Pentagon pressure, the White House this summer agreed privately to permit a maximum force of about 10,000 troops to assist with intelligence gathering and to mentor Iraqi troops.

The U.S. troop presence is one of the most contentious issues for Iraqis.

At Tuesday's five-hour closed-door meeting in Baghdad, senior Iraqi leaders gave the go-ahead for talks with the U.S. and also paved the way for Iraq's feuding political factions to end their disputes.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said after the meeting that the negotiators would include Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, government advisors, the foreign minister and security ministers when they are finally named.

He said details still needed to be worked out, and he described the session as contentious. Still, the meeting ended with a consensus that talks had to begin.

One of the biggest obstacles before the meeting was the political stalemate that had pitted Maliki's coalition against his secular Shiite rival, Iyad Allawi.

The dispute between the men, who finished in a near-tie in 2010 national elections, has resulted in Iraq still not naming its defense or interior ministers. Maliki has been running both ministries.

At the meeting, the two sides agreed that Allawi's Iraqiya bloc would submit at least three names for defense minister and Maliki's coalition would do the same for interior minister. They would then attempt to choose the ministers at a meeting in two weeks.

Similarly, they agreed that legislation for a new national strategic policy council, to be headed by Allawi, would be submitted to parliament for approval, months after the body was supposed to have been formed. However, the sides still have to agree on how Allawi would be sworn in as head of the body. Allawi has said he should be approved by parliament; Maliki insists it should happen inside the new council. The dispute has held up the completion of a government since December.

An Iraqiya official expressed optimism that Maliki would move quickly on a security agreement with the Americans because Iraqis know that the U.S. military drawdown will accelerate in September, with all American troops scheduled to leave at the end of the year.

The official predicted that the country's political leaders, with the exception of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, would now be likely to support an agreement in parliament granting U.S. forces immunity from legal prosecution in Iraq if they are serving in a training mission rather than a combat one.

Mullen wants the Iraqis to make a decision soon.

"Time is quickly running out for us to be able to consider any other course" but to leave, Mullen told reporters at the Camp Victory base, headquarters of the U.S. military in Iraq.

He also warned that the U.S. government would not accept any deal granting U.S. troops immunity from Iraqi prosecution if it did not pass parliament. Maliki and Zebari had previously argued that any deal for security trainers could be reached between the ministry involved and the U.S. government, but American officials said that would not provide enough protection.

About 46,000 U.S. forces remain in Iraq.

Zebari cautioned that the outcome of any talks on a continuing U.S. military presence was unpredictable.

"There aren't any foregone conclusions," he said.

- ned.parker@latimes.com

Salman is a news assistant in The Times' Baghdad bureau.

Times staff writer David S. Cloud in Washington contributed to this report.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-us-20110803,0,3545876.story


 

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]Iraq snapshot - August 3, 2011


The Common Ills




Wednesday, August 3, 2011.  Chaos and violence continue, US Senators Patty Murray, Jay Rockefeller, Max Bacus and Robert Casey work to determine how many veterans are taking their own lives, Jane Arraf demonstrates (without show boating) why her knowledge of Iraq is second only to the legendary Robert Fisk, Matthew Rothschild demonstrates that if you're too dishonest to call out Barack then you're also dishonest enough to try to rewrite facts in order to make your bad column more 'pleasing,' and more.
 

http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2011/08/iraq-snapshot_03.html

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Middle East
Aug 6, 2011 
 
 http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MH06Ak03.html

 

 
US drags its feet in Iraq


By Karamatullah K Ghori


After days of wrangling, leaders of the main political parties of Iraq agreed on August 2 to hand a joint mandate to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to negotiate with the United States on whether some Americans troops will stay on in Iraq to "train" Iraqi forces beyond the end of this year.

United States forces, according to President Barack Obama's withdrawal plan, are scheduled to vacate Iraq by the end of year deadline. It's also an "open secret" however that the long-established American preference is not to leave Iraq entirely. Pentagon pundits in Washington, and some of their fellow-travelers in Iraq, have long been thinking aloud that some American troops ought to stay on beyond the deadline, if only to train the Iraqis in keeping peace and ensuring security once the Americans are gone.

The ostensible justification for the Americans to still have their boots on the Iraqi soil is that the Iraqi security forces are, as yet, not quite ready to guarantee that the country will not slide into anarchy and lawlessness once the Americans disappear from the land.

A US government report released on July 30 said the security situation was deteriorating amid a wave of assassinations and Iranian-backed militia attacks. Up to 1,000 al-Qaeda militants remain in Iraq, the special inspector for Iraq reconstruction warned. June was the bloodiest month since April 2009 for US troops in Iraq, with 14 soldiers killed in attacks. Another five died in July.

Powerful and influential voices within the Iraqi coalition led by Maliki have been expressing concerns about the readiness of the Iraqi security forces with impunity. These voices have lately become more agitated as the deadline for US withdrawal nears. Encouragement for their alarm has come from the likes of Admiral Mike Mullen, the soon-to-retire chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who "urged" the Iraqis to make up their minds and take a "quick decision" barely hours before the Iraqi leaders, bending to his pressure, threw in the towel.

The US interest in prolonging its military presence in Iraq, albeit with less strength, may be dictated more by security than any other factor. The generals overseeing the Iraqi operation - from Washington as well as those on the ground - have been singing in unison that the Iraqi security forces weren't quite up to scratch to deal with the challenges ahead.

In touting the line that Iraqi forces are inadequate to rise to challenges that remain largely undefined beyond the cryptic excuse of sectarian divide, the generals betray an appalling disregard for their own failure to train their Iraqi proteges sufficiently. If they couldn't do it in eight years, despite all the resources and numbers at their command, what's there to lend confidence to anyone that they'd be able to find the holy grail of a competent and fully trained Iraqi security force with a thinned-out and scaled-down presence?

Iraqi politicians, representing the full spectrum of the country's myriad factions and clans, do seem to a certain extent to subscribe to the American angst on account of the Iraqi troops' half-baked ability to take charge of the gargantuan task of keeping the country secured against anarchy. Even the maverick Muqtada al-Sadr, whose opposition to American military presence in Iraq is well-known, may not mind a token US presence beyond the deadline of December 31, 2011, if only to train the Iraqi forces.

The official announcement from Baghdad, at the end of an hours-long conclave, was personally steered by President Jalal Talabani, and reflected the shared perception of the disparate Iraqi leadership that the Americans may still have limited utility. It said, cryptically: "The leaders agreed to authorize the Iraqi government to start the talks with the United States that are limited to training issues." (Emphasis added).

But that's where the consensus ends as many among the myriad Iraqi forces take a closer look at what really lurks underneath the American's surface claim that it is motivated solely by the inadequacy of Iraqi troops.

There's concern, not only among the Sadrists but also among other Shi'ite factions, including Maliki's own, that the Americans want to linger on in Iraq because of their Kurdish proteges. The history of Iraq since the first Gulf war of 1990-91 lends enough credence to their argument that the Americans would like to chaperon the Kurds for as long as possible.

The Kurds, led by Masood Barzani, have been sheltered by the Americans ever since the first Gulf war ended. They have been ruling and lording over the Kurdish areas virtually like an independent entity, and Baghdad's influence over the Kurdish lands is non-existent.

However, the future of Kirkuk, the oil-producing heart of Iraq, still hangs in the balance, with both the Arabs and Kurds of Iraq claiming it as theirs, exclusively. The Americans have stood in between the two in Kirkuk like a referee and still seem to covet, if not exactly relish, that role.

But the likes of Muqtada want the Americans to get out of the way, and aren't ready to fall for the excuse, posited from Washington and other like-minded Western capitals, that but for the Americans outside players, such as Iran, would make a tense stand-off even worse. For some time, many self-anointed advisers and soothsayers have been painting scenarios of open conflict with Iran, if only to knock the fear of god in the hearts of the Iraqis.
However, the biggest question mark hanging over the prospects of the American forces staying on in Iraq as "trainers", if not occupiers by another name, is the Washington demand that the trainers be given a completely free hand and, above everything else, immunity from Iraqi laws. Muqtada, for one, is dead against any kind of immunity for the American forces, under any guise or garb. His representative walked out of the Talabani meeting on this issue and he commands a large following among the Iraqi Shi'ites.

The immunity issue is explosive in the Iraqi context. The Iraqi memories of American combat troops and private 'contractors' running amok and going completely berserk, are still quite fresh; the wounds inflicted by the mercenary contractors are still raw and bleeding.

It's unthinkable that the Iraqis, no matter how little faith they have in the ability of their American-trained security troops to protect them, will sign on dotted lines marked by Washington. By the same token, it is highly unlikely that American regular troops and contracted mercenaries would stay on Iraqi soil without the umbrella protection of immunity.

Karamatullah K Ghori is a retired Pakistani ambassador whose assignments took him among others, to Iraq. He can be reached at K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
 
 
 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MH06Ak03.html

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IRAQ; Alarming statement and constant harassment offer no respite for journalistsre

Reporters Without Borders


August 4, 2011



Reporters Without Borders is concerned about repeated harassment of media personnel, especial TV crews, by the Iraqi security forces. Physical attacks on journalists, confiscation of their material and orders preventing them working are all common despite Reporters Without Borders’ appeals to the Iraqi government.

The press freedom organization is also very alarmed to learn that a senior interior ministry official, Adnan Al-Asadi, said on 31 July that freedom of information could now pose "a threat to internal security" in Iraq. Journalists must no longer publish information about murders or arrests without the ministry’s consent because of the fragile security situation in Iraq, he said.

This official’s statement confirms Reporters Without Borders’ growing concern about a deterioration in the media’s ability to operate freely in Iraq.

In one of the most recent incidents, the security forces detained Salaheddeen TV cameraman Haidar Abid Hassan on 28 July in Tikrit, 185 km north of Baghdad, while he was covering an explosion in the city centre that killed 15 people and wounded around 40 others. He was forcibly taken to a military vehicle and beaten by soldiers. Then he was subjected to psychological harassment in connection with his work as a journalist. Many other journalists were attacked by the security forces that day.

While covering a demonstration in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square on 22 July, photographer Saad Allah Al-Khaledi was detained by members of the security forces, who forced him into a car, beat and threatened him with a gun against his head.

He told the Journalism Freedom Observatory, the Reporters Without Borders partner organization in Iraq, that at one point, when he was blindfolded and his hands were tied, he heard one of his captors say: "Move away from him so that you don’t get blood on you when I shoot him in the head (lien: http://www.jfoiraq.org/newsdetails....)."

Security forces attacked a crew working for the Al-Baghdadiya TV programme "Sabahak ya Iraq" on 17 July, destroying their generator and injuring the soundman. Four days before that, on 13 July, an Al-Babliya TV crew was attacked and insulted by members of the security forces in front of witnesses while doing a report in Zawra Park in the centre of Baghdad.

Without giving any reason, the authorities also banned the media from meeting victims and relatives of victims of the double suicide bombing on 4 July near the Hotel Rashid (http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/irak-au...).

Reporters Without Borders takes note of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s decision to rescind the Broadcasting Security Council’s dismissal of Abd Al-Satar Al-Baydani as editor of the newspaper Al-Sabah, a position he had held since March. He was fired for getting the facts wrong in a report about relations between Iraq and Kuwait.


Link: en.rsf.org/iraq-alarming-statement-and-constant-04-08-2011,40750.html

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Desperate for Democracy in Iraq

Protesters fight for what U.S. media say they already have

By Julie Hollar

FAIR , August 4, 2011

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4367

The U.S.-based women’s rights group MADRE (6/10/11) reported that members of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq—its partner organization in Baghdad—and other protesters were brutally beaten and sexually assaulted in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square on June 10 by government-sponsored mobs. What were they demonstrating for that so threatened Iraq’s government?

Democracy.

"For months, young women have been demonstrating for democracy in Tahrir Square, joining thousands of others who believe in a vision of an Iraq that is democratic and rooted in human rights," OWFI director Yanar Mohammed told MADRE. "But instead of being heard, they have been viciously attacked in an attempt to silence them."

How to make sense of the fact that protesters are demanding the fundamentals of democracy in a country we’ve been repeatedly told by media already is a democracy—albeit a "fragile," "nascent" or "rudimentary" one—one that the U.S. government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to establish? In the top U.S. newspapers, it seemed the easiest way out of that conundrum was simply not to examine it too closely.

When the Washington Post and New York Times covered the June demonstrations (6/11/11), they didn’t even use the word "democracy" in their reports; both simply called participants "anti-government protesters." The Times gave the story only two paragraphs at the end of an article about unrelated military activity, and framed the mob attacks on the protesters as a pro-government demonstration that happened to attack a small group of "anti-government protesters." A week earlier, the Times (6/3/11) explained that the movement "had quieted to a near whisper lately," in part because of an ebbing of "public interest."


The June demonstration grew out of a nationwide day of protests on February 25, known as the "Day of Rage," in which tens of thousands of Iraqis across the country took to the streets to demand civil and political rights, and to protest against corruption and unemployment and the lack of basic services like water and electricity. In many places, they demanded the resignation of local and national officials—in a few cases, successfully. They were met with violent repression by security forces that killed at least 20; many were beaten or tortured, and journalists were detained and attacked (Amnesty International, 4/12/11).

The two papers’ coverage of that February uprising were hesitant to draw parallels to the rest of the Arab Spring. The Post (2/26/11) wrote that "the demonstrators who sparked the crackdown were calling for reform, not revolution" in Iraq’s "fledgling democracy." The paper repeated that distinction the next day: "The Iraq protests were different from many of the revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa in that demonstrators were calling for reform, not for getting rid of the government."

Times editors (3/14/11) echoed the Post, pointing out that Iraqis, unlike other Arab Spring protesters, weren’t calling for "the political system’s overthrow"; the editors found it "reassuring" that the protests in Iraq were done "without picking up guns."

The Post’s editorial page (3/6/11), for its part, took heart in the fact that despite the government’s violent assault on dissent, "Iraq is also a rudimentary democracy." The editorial acknowledged some of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s unseemlier tactics, like "arresting and beating journalists and intellectuals," dispatching "black-suited special forces" to suppress demonstrators, and taking "control of electoral authorities." But none of that dissuaded the Post from expecting positive changes—as long as the U.S. stays involved:


Still, eight years suggest that neither Mr. Maliki nor anyone else is apt to recreate the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. More likely, other Arab states will come to resemble Iraq—electoral democracies where Islamic parties compete for power, ministries struggle to deliver services, and terrorism and government heavy-handedness flare. At best, the popular demand for good government and greater democracy will slowly propel Iraq and its neighbors toward greater stability and liberalism, as happened in Muslim Indonesia. But much worse outcomes are possible—which is why the United States must try to remain engaged with Iraq even as its forces withdraw.


That strong foreign involvement implies less democratic control by a country’s citizens seemed not to have crossed the minds of the Post’s editors.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (4/13/11) appeared completely unfazed by Iraq’s democracy problem:

The primary ingredient of a democracy —real pluralism where people feel a common destiny, act as citizens and don’t believe their minority has to be in power to be safe or to thrive—is in low supply in all these societies. It can emerge, as Iraq shows. But it takes time.



But can Iraq be deemed a true "electoral democracy"? And is it actually so different from the rest of the Middle East and North Africa? While the UN called the 2010 parliamentary elections "credible" (New York Times, 3/27/10), they were marred by allegations of fraud, intimidation and vote-buying, and by the disqualifications of many candidates who supposedly had Baathist ties—a majority from the parties of al-Maliki’s chief rivals (Financial Times, 3/11/10; Congressional Research Service, 5/18/11). And for several months after the elections, parliament’s inability to form a ruling majority left Iraqis without a representative government, as al-Maliki ruled in the vacuum and increased his authoritarian grip.

As MADRE director Yifat Susskind told Extra!, the Iraqi people "know that real democracy means more than just elections." According to Freedom House (1/13/11), a conservative-leaning group that rates "rights and freedoms integral to democratic institutions" in each country based on an analysis of political rights and civil liberties, Iraq fails to meet the minimum criteria to be classified as an electoral democracy. The country ranks "not free" in the group’s 2011 report—at the same level on Freedom House’s 14-point scale as Egypt, Bahrain, Algeria and Yemen. (Afghanistan, the U.S.’s other years-long experiment in "democracy-building," actually scores one point worse, though it has thus far avoided the kind of sustained large-scale protests that have broken out in the Middle East and North Africa.) And Freedom House notes that political participation in Iraq is "seriously impaired" by violence, corruption and foreign (read: U.S.) influence, and that civil liberties and rule of law exist on paper but much less so in practice.

Given the lack of freedom and access to political participation, and the repression facing protesters, how significant are the distinctions between Iraq’s "democracy" and its "authoritarian" neighbors? It’s worth noting, too, that the other protests across North Africa and the Middle East began as calls for reform rather than revolution—and the majority have been largely nonviolent. The "democratic" label the White House has applied to the Iraqi government, however misleading, seems to skew journalists’ analysis.


A front-page New York Times article on April 14, headlined, "Iraq Crushing Youths’ Efforts to Be Heard," took a more in-depth look at youth-led protests rocking Iraq, but remained largely sanguine. After quoting an 18-year-old protester in Basra who argued, '’We don’t have democracy, and the politicians have no idea what it means," the Times countered with a more upbeat note: "But it is a measure of progress that these students can speak out freely and join in street protests."

Such attempts at optimism sat uneasily with information later in the article that "organizers spoke of being detained and beaten by security forces after the protests."

The Times (3/23/11) provided a rare acknowledgment of the reality behind Iraq’s "democracy" in a piece on the country taking the helm of the Arab League. Noting the persistent violence, corruption and authoritarian moves by al-Maliki, the paper pointed out the "unintentional irony" of Iraq acting as a leader and example for other Middle Eastern countries moving toward democracy. But the Times was quick to place the blame on Iraqis—for lacking the democratic "mentality" (as an anonymous diplomat put it) in a country "where religion is intertwined with politics" (according to "many critics," likewise anonymous ).

The Times seems to accept the common misconception that Islam and democracy are radically opposed to each other, but other countries disprove that stereotype: Both Indonesia and Mali are Islamic democracies that Freedom House ranks "free" and truly democratic. Both states also previously had long authoritarian traditions, like Iraq, proving that while it may be difficult, such histories can be overcome.


Curiously, the role of the U.S. in "democracy-building" in Iraq received little scrutiny. Reports on this effort (e.g., Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, 2/08) note that there’s little true understanding of what might work, so that even those developing and implementing policies and projects with the best of intentions are "often reinventing the wheel or making it up as they go along."

The intentions of "democracy-builders" aren’t always the best, however, and military objectives tend to trump establishing civilian democratic rule; for example, the Defense Department plays a major role in the "democracy" project, using troops to provide aid and reconstruction services and blurring the lines between civilian and military rule.

And as MADRE’s Susskind argues: "Genuine democracy would be counter to U.S. interests in Iraq. After all, the two main goals of the U.S. in Iraq—controlling oil reserves and building military bases—would never have been achieved through a democratic process."


 http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4367

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Iraq snapshot - August 4, 2011



The Common Ills



Thursday, August 4, 2011. Chaos and violence continue, War Truths get spoken (but why only by the right?), Barack's plan o extend the illegal war continues, and more.
 
http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2011/08/iraq-snapshot_04.html

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Leave Iraq to the Iraqis

The Skeptics


by  Doug Bandow | July 28, 2011

Many advocates of promiscuous military intervention angrily reject the claim that America is an “empire.” Granted, the U.S. doesn’t directly rule its imperial dependents. But Washington policymakers do insist on maintaining a military presence wherever and whenever possible, irrespective of America’s defense needs.

The Obama administration’s attempt to pressure the Iraqi government into “inviting” the U.S. to remain is almost comical. Rather than requiring Baghdad to demonstrate why a continuing American presence is necessary, U.S. officials have been begging to stay. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said: “I hope they figure out a way to ask.” His successor, Leon Panetta, recently blurted out: “dammit, make a decision.”

However, it is Washington that should make a decision and bring home America’s troops.

The U.S. continues to garrison Europe, Japan and South Korea decades after American forces first arrived. All of these international welfare queens could defend themselves. Despite President Bill Clinton’s promise that American troops would spend just a year occupying the Balkans, an area of minimal security interest to the United States, some troops remain to this day. And uber-hawks talk about maintaining a permanent presence in Afghanistan, as distant from conventional U.S. defense interests as any nation on the planet.

But right now Iraq is exciting the most concern, since the United States is supposed to withdraw its combat forces by year end. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the top military spokesman in Iraq, said Washington “has committed to an enduring partnership with Iraq,” but it would be easier if the Iraqis spoke up “while we have troops here and infrastructure here.”

From start to (almost) finish, the Iraqi operation has been a tragic fiasco. The United States invaded to seize nonexistent WMDs. American forces destroyed the country’s system of ordered tyranny, turning the country into a bloody charnel house, killing hundreds of thousands and forcing millions to flee. Washington’s occupation transferred democracy to Iraq without the larger liberal culture necessary for democracy to thrive. U.S. intervention empowered Iran while destroying Baghdad’s ability to control its own borders.

Yet President Obama wants to stick around, meddling in Iraq’s domestic affairs and defending it in foreign matters.

The United States should not have invaded Iraq. Washington can’t undo the ill effects of the war, but it can avoid the costs of a permanent occupation.

America’s job in Iraq is done. The Iraqis should be left in charge of their national destiny. All U.S. troops should be withdrawn. Washington should stop collecting increasingly dangerous dependencies for its empire.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/leave-iraq-the-iraqis-5675

[bigron]

Sadr warns against US presence in Iraq


Sun Aug 7, 2011 9:4AM GMT



Senior Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr

Iraq's influential cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has issued a warning that any US training mission in Iraq after 2011 will be confronted by “military means”.

More

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/192743.html

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Iraq: Phantom Electricity Contracts ... عقود الكهرباء وهمية

by Imad Khadduri

http://abutamam.blogspot.com/2011/08/blog-post.html

August 6, 2011

NEW SCANDAL IN MINISTRY OF ELECTRICITY (MoE):

- MoE Deputy Minister Raad Al-Hariss signed on 3rd July a contract worth $1.2 billion to a Canadian company under the name of CAPGENT of Vancouver.
- On 6th July MoE signed another contract to a German company called Maschinenbau Habentstads Mbh worth $500 million.

A former Iraqi minister of planning in the mid seventies who live in Vancouver decided to make his own investigation..Accordingly, he wrote a personal letter on 3rd August 2011 (attached herewith) to PM Maliki revealing that such companies are no more than paper companies.
This is a brief summary:
- The Canadian co. was first registered on 20/5/2008 using a numbered name BC-0825450 by Mrs Gisele Lorrane Summers using her home address (1112 Thomas Avenue—Coquitlam, B.C.- V3K2Ka as an office address
- On 6/5/2011, she changed the numbered name to : Canadian Alliance for Power Generation Equipment inc (CAPGENT) and appointed Mr. Muhanad Samara as manager in Amman. Later the address of the company was changed to another address (see document)
- Similarly Dr. Jawad investigated through GOOGLE the German co and asked another former Iraqi minister living in Germany to check from official records..He replied by referring to a German court press statement on 13/5/2011 that Maschinenbau Habentstads Mbh had filed for bankruptcy on 11/1/2011 but thanks to administrative & financial measures by A Lebanese co called SAKR Group kept the name !

Dr Jawad received a reply from Dr Hussein Shahrastani (Deputy PM for Oil & Electricity) confirming that he had instructed MoE & TBI to cancel said two contracts and any related payments. Another note through Ali Al-Dabbagh the minister & cabinet spokesman confirmed that..Below is some exchange of emails .

MAIN QUESTIONS:

How can MoE sign such huge contracts without proper authorization from the Cabinet? Who else is involved?

How many similar contracts had been made and gone uncovered with at least some hefty down payments made??

Only few days ago I found the following news item showing how a contractor with the Pentagon has inflated prices for Iraq contracts by 5000-12000 times !!! Robbery is not a word to be used !

Will anyone be held accountable and when? History throughout past eight years that tens of billions of dollars and score of senior officials including minister were subject of major corruption scandals but none was taken to court.

What is the reaction of credible foreign companies who eye Iraq as a promising market for their business?

What will be the reaction of foreign countries who call for anti-corruption measures?

What will NGOs like Transparency say?

Issam Chalabi
6/8/2011
........
"Attached to this email is my personal letter to H.E. The Prime Minister Of Iraq - Mr. Nouri Al-Malaki. The letter is in PDF format which also has several other documents combined within it.
Note that the attached PDF/letter is large in size (approximately 5 MB), thus please be patient when downloading it.

I would be immensely grateful to you if you print the letter and have it submitted to the Prime Minister.

Very truly yours,
Jawad Hashim"

Dr. Jawad Hashim is the previous Iraqi Minister of Planning in the 1970s. He found out that the Ministry of Electricity had signed at the beginning of July 2011 two billion dollars plus contracts with Canadian and German companies.
He investigated the matter online and proved, with documents, that the Canadian company Capgent is non-existant, and that the German company MASCHINENBAU Halberstadt had declared bankruptcy in February 2011.
He is appealing in his letter that Al-Maliki would cancel the two contracts. The letter is in Arabic and the documentation is in English. Kindly see the email exchanges in the first Comment, below.


.
رسالة وزير التخطيط الأسبق د. جواد هاشم للمالكي - "عقود الكهرباء وهمية"ـ
.
أثارت المعلومات الخطيرة (التي كشفتها شبكة الوليد للاعلام) في وقت سابق حول الشركات الوهمية التي تعاقدت معها وزارة الكهرباء لتحسين الكهرباء إهتمام الراي العام في العراق.ـ
إذ بحث الدكتور جواد هاشم، وزير التخطيط الاسبق في زمن الرئيس الاسبق احمد حسن البكر، في مصداقية عقدين تم التوقيع عليهما في أوائل تموز 2011، وتأكد بالأدلة القاطعة ان الشركات التي تعاقد معها مسؤولون من حكومة نوري المالكي أما وهمية مائة بالمائة أو كانت قد أعلنت إفلاسها.ـ
وفي الوقت الذي تـُسرق به الاموال المخصصة للكهرباء، يعيش العراقيون اقسى واصعب ايامهم تحت الحرارة اللاهبة.ـ

تتضمن الرسالة التي بعثها وزير التخطيط الأسبق إلى رئيس الوزراء نوري المالكي في الثاني من آب الجاري، على وثائق حول قيام وزارة الكهرباء بتوقيع عقود بناء محطات توليد الطاقة الكهربائية في مناطق مختلفة من العراق مع شركات تبين له أنها إما وهمية لا وجود لها، أو مفلسة.ـ

كشف جواد هاشم أن الحكومة العراقية، ممثلة بالوكيل الأقدم لوزارة الكهرباء المهندس رعد الحارس، كانت قد وقعَّت في 3 تموز 2011 عقدا مع شركة كندية تدعى
Capgent
لبناء عشرة محطات كهربائية، سريعة النصب، طاقة كل محطة مئة ميغاواط، وبطاقة اجمالية قدرها الف ميغاواط، وبفترة انجاز قدرها 12 شهراً. قيمة العقد، كما ورد في الصحافة، هو 1.2 مليار دولار أمريكي.ـ
قدمت الشركة
Capgent
عنوان مقرها في فانكوفر الكندية على النحو التالي:ـ
440-319 W. Pender Street- Vancouver, B.C., Canada
ولكون الدكتور جواد هاشم مقيما في مدينة فانكوفر الكندية منذ مدة طويلة، قام بالبحث (كما يقول في رسالته إلى المالكي) عن هذه الشركة، فاتصل هاتفياً بمقرها فلم يتلق غير رسائل مسجلة، أو سيدة ترفض الإجابة على أي سؤال، وكذلك لم يتسلم أي جواب على رسائله الالكترونية. وأخيراً ذهب بنفسه إلى العنوان المزعوم، فلم يجد أثراً لمقر الشركة، فالعنوان مزيف، والشركة وهمية رغم أنها تدَّعي بأنها مسجلة في كندا تحت رقم
0825450 B.C.
ومديرها العام مهند سمارة، إذ وجد أن العنوان في الشارع المذكور يعود إلى محام اسمه
Ellis
ونظراً لخطورة الموقف، فقد بعث الوزير الأسبق بالرسالة التي يُحذر فيها من هذه الشركة الوهمية، وقبل "تسليم مليار ومائتي مليون دولار من أموال الشعب إلى "نصابين ومحتالين".ـ

كما وأشارت الرسالة إلى قيام وزارة الكهرباء بتوقيع عقد في 6 تموز 2011 مع شركة ألمانية باسم
MASCHINENBAU Halberstadt
والتي يرمز لها اختصاراً
(MBH)
و صاحبها الرئيسي شركة لبنانية باسم "صقر لبنان" وعنوانها: "شارع قرطبة 98 جبيل جالات، عمان 11831، الأردن".ـ
ووفقاً لمواقع إلكترونية عديدة، فإن هذه الشركة كانت قد أعلنت إفلاسها يوم 11 كانون الثاني 2011، وتصفيتها في محكمة ماجديبورك شرق ألمانيا، أي قبل ستة أشهر من تاريخ توقيعها العقد مع وزارة الكهرباء وبحضور الوزير المهندس رعد شلال سعيد، ولكن ترتيباً مالياً وإدارياً أنقذ الشركة من الإفلاس، ويقف وراء عملية الإنقاذ الشريك الأساسي المقيم في لبنان باسم
SAKR Group

وفي ختام رسالته، يناشد جواد هاشم رئيس الوزراء، السيد نوري المالكي، قائلاً:"ومن خبرتي المتواضعة أود أن أوضح بأن خضوع أية شركة لترتيبات محاكم الإفلاس يعني أن أي خلاف بين الشركة ووزارة الكهرباء حول تنفيذ بنود العقد أو بعد إكمال المشروع يعني إحالة الخلاف إلى محكمة الإفلاس الألمانية، وهي أمور بالغة التعقيد يكون العراق في غنى عنها. ثم ألم تستفسر الوزارة عن الوضع المالي للشركة قبل توقيع العقد، خاصة وأن الإفلاس قد أعلن عنه ستة أشهر سابقة لتوقيع العقد مع الوزارة؟ إن هذا الأمر يستدعي حتماً إلغاء هذا العقد المشبوه."ـ

 
http://abutamam.blogspot.com/2011/08/blog-post.html

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Mullah Omar not willing to hold peace talks with Afghan government: Taliban



ANI



Kabul, Aug 7 2011 (ANI): The Taliban has dismissed reports that their leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had shown willingness to hold peace talks with the Afghanistan government.

According to TOLOnews, a Taliban spokesman, who contacted them, said that the Afghan High Peace Council wants to raise some more funds by making such claims.

He said that there haven't been any direct or indirect contacts between the Taliban and Karzai government.

"When our leader Mullah Omar could resist against 49 countries, how come he could say he is ready for talks? This is a baseless claim. The puppet peace council makes these claims just to keep foreigners' money flowing into the council," the spokesman said.

"They are making untruthful promises. These claims would not result in anything and would not turn into reality," he added.

Earlier, a senior member of the Afghan High Peace Council had said that Omar was willing to hold peace talks with the Karzai government.

"Mullah Mohammad Omar is ready to join the peace process and he no more sticks to not holding talks with the Afghan government," Ismaiel Qasemyar had said. (ANI)

Source


http://www.newstrackindia.com/newsdetails/234111


 

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Published on Monday, August 8, 2011 by Agence France-Presse


UN Calls Rights Situation in Iraq 'Fragile'


A UN report released on Monday said the human rights situation in Iraq is still "fragile," citing issues including economic and political stagnation, continued violence and attacks on minorities.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/08-3

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Published on Monday, August 8, 2011 by Foreign Policy in Focus


The Ongoing Costs of the Iraq War


by Fatima Al-zeheri



When you destroy someone’s property, you usually have to pay compensation. The United States is responsible for much of the destruction that has taken place in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. But instead of offering compensation to the Iraqis, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has demanded that the Iraqi government pay the United States compensation in dollars for the cost of U.S.-led war. The Iraqi response was to kick Rohrabacher out of Baghdad.
Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) makes his demand; image courtesy of Veterans Today


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/08-5

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Ishaqi Again: Another Day, Another Atrocity in the Endless Iraq War


by Chris Floyd


August 9, 2011


http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2156-ishaqi-again-another-day-another-atrocity-in-the-endless-iraq-war.html


There was a raid in Ishaqi last week. Armed men crept upon the sleeping houses in the dead of night. Armed men stirring in the darkness, in a land still open, like a flayed wound, to violent death and chaos from every direction, many years after the savage act of aggression that first tore the country to pieces.

They crept toward the houses. They said nothing, gave no warning, could not be clearly seen, did not identify themselves. "Thieves!" someone shouted. Someone grabbed a rifle – one kept ready at hand to guard the sleeping family – and fired a shot to scare away the raiders.

But men creeping in the darkness were not local thieves. They were soldiers of the foreign army that still occupied the land. Foreign invaders, accompanied by forces from the local army they had raised for the government they had built on the mound of a million rotting corpses.

Armed to the teeth with expensive gear bought with public money from bloated war profiteers in the invaders’ home country, the creeping men were not to be frightened off by a rifle shot fired blindly in the darkness. They saw the flash – and lit up the village with heavy gunfire and grenades. They called in a helicopter gunship hovering nearby to support them against the rifle of a villager awakened by the sound of unknown, unidentified, armed men creeping near his house and family.

In the tumult, a 13-year-old boy began running through the garden, frightened, confused, trying to escape the hellish metal flying all around him. But the metal found him; it tore into his fleeing body – the body of this scared, unarmed boy running away from the well-armed soldiers – the bullets tore into his body and killed him in the garden where he used to play.

The armed men  then stalked through the village. Kicking down doors, dragging people out, hogtied, and throwing them into the dirt.  They ransacked, they smashed, they ripped, they broke – and, like thieves, they stole.

"We heard gunfire near our house, and my son woke up and went to the garden because he was afraid," said the boy’s mother, Nagia Gamas, 51. "They shot him and my husband."

... Muhammad Farhan, a 62-year-old farmer in Ishaqi ... said Iraqi and American forces knocked down his door around 2 a.m. Friday, tied him and three of his relatives up and took them outside.

He said that the Iraqi and American forces searched his house, stole a check from him and took his brother’s passport. "The Americans were telling us we are liars and terrorists," Mr. Farhan said. "Why do you attack us? We are just innocent people."

It was just another night in the unending American war against Iraq. It was just another non-combatant death added to the million or more such deaths caused, by direct or collateral hand, by the illegal American invasion, now in its eighth year.

And it was just another atrocity in Ishaqi, where the American invaders and their colonial helpers had already inflicted horror and death on the area’s children in years past. The 13-year-old boy – who had been only five when the invasion began, so many years and so many deaths ago, probably knew the little children, some just a few months old, killed in the earlier attacks. As I noted here in March 2006:

We know that U.S. forces conducted a raid on a house in the village on March 15. ... We know that two Iraqi police officials, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein – both employed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government – told Reuters that the 11 occupants of the house, including the five children, had been bound and shot in the head before the house was blown up. We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police told Reuters that an American helicopter landed on the roof in the early hours of the morning, then the house was blown up, and then the victims were discovered. We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police said that an autopsy performed on the bodies found that "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head."

We know that Ahmed Khalaf, brother of house's owner, told AP that nine of the [11] victims were family members and two were visitors, adding, "the killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children. The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."

We know from the photographs that one child, the youngest, the baby, has a gaping wound in his forehead. We can see that one other child, a girl with a pink ribbon in her hair, is lying on her side and has blood oozing from the back of her head. ... We know from the photographs that two of the children – two girls, still in their pajamas – are lying with their dead eyes open. We can see that the light and tenderness that animate the eyes of every young child have vanished; nothing remains but the brute stare of nothingness into nothingness. We can see that the other three children have their eyes closed; two are limp, but the baby has one stiffened arm raised to his cheek, as if trying to ward off the blow that gashed and pulped his face so terribly.

Later, the Pentagon changed its original story about the raid, in which it claimed that "only" one man, two women and a single child had been killed. Following an "investigation," the Pentagon said that one terrorist had been killed, along with "three noncombatant" deaths and an estimated nine "collateral deaths." (As I noted at the time: The difference between these two categories is not explained. And of course it doesn't matter to the innocent people killed; whether they are "non-combatants" or "collaterals," they're still just as dead.) The invaders categorically denied that any children had been shot in the head. But the evidence indicated differently:

First is the photographic evidence: pictures taken of the aftermath by Agence France Presse, and a video that emerged this week on BBC. These clearly dispute the Pentagon's account, which holds that the house was first raked with gunfire, then attack by helicopter gunships, then finally bombed by American jets: a massive barrage of firepower that left the house in ruins. But the video shows that part of the house was left standing. The photographs, which have been widely available for months, show five dead children, one of them only a few months old. They have been laid out by grieving relatives. Their bodies show no signs of having been ripped up or damaged in the course of an all-out air and ground assault; as the BBC's John Simpson points out, they had not been crushed by the collapse of the house, as the Pentagon claimed. Instead, they are unmarked, their clothes dusty but in most cases untorn. In the photographs I saw, one child clearly has blood oozing from the back of her head, while the baby has a hole in his forehead, and other damage to his face. The other children are laid on their back, with their wounds invisible, their bodies remarkably whole. Simpson, shown viewing the film, said it was clear that the children had been shot.

Second is the testimony of the villagers, and of two officials of the U.S.-backed Iraqi police, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein. These are men who risk their lives by their cooperation with the Coalition. The villagers say soldiers entered the house and killed the occupants; the house was later hit by the helicopter then bombed, apparently to cover up the killings, some of the villagers surmised. The Iraqi police said "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head." Later, a Knight-Ridder reporter saw a preliminary report indicating that the 11 victims had multiple wounds. This tallies with Simpson's viewing, which showed that one of the dead children had been shot in the side. Everyone who saw or examined the bodies agreed that the victims had been shot, most likely by bullets from the large pile of American-issue cartridges found inside the house, which can also be seen on the video.

This was in March. Just a few months later, there was an even greater massacre:

So what happened on December 9 in the village of Taima in the Ishaqi district, on the shores of Lake Tharthar? The official U.S. military version states that unidentified "Coalition Forces" entered the village shortly after midnight and targeted a location "based on intelligence reports that indicated associates with links to multiple al-Qaeda in Iraq networks were operating in the area." During a search, they took heavy fire from a nearby building. Returning fire, they killed "two armed terrorists" but couldn't quell the attack, so they called in an airstrike that killed "18 more armed terrorists." ...

The identification of the victims as terrorists was made through a "battle damage assessment," said U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver. "If there is a weapon with or next to the person or they are holding it, they are a terrorist," he said.

Garver firmly refused to identify the troops involved in the raid; he wouldn't even say if they were American, Iraqi, or from some other Coalition ally, the Daily Telegraph reports. "There are some units we don't talk about," he said. But the conclusions of the official report were unequivocal: 20 terrorists killed, no collateral damage. ...

But local officials from the U.S.-backed Iraqi government had a different view: they said the raid was a bloodbath of innocent civilians. Ishaqi Mayor Amir Fayadh said that 19 civilians were killed by the airstrikes that destroyed two private homes. Fayadh said that the victims included seven women and eight children. An official in the regional government of Salahuddin said six children had been killed. All Iraqi officials agreed that the victims were mostly members of the extended families of two brothers in the town, Muhammad Hussein al-Jalmood and Mahmood Hussein al-Jalmood, the NYT reports. ...

Soon after the attack, reporters and photographers from Associated Press and Agence France Presse arrived on the scene. They took pictures, shot video and talked to grieving members of the al-Jalmood family. Local police gave them the names of at least 17 of the victims, which indicated they were from the same family. The names of at least four women were among them. Many of the bodies had been charred and twisted beyond recognition; some were "almost mummified," AP reports. However, AFP videotaped at least two children among the dead.

When shown the pictures later, Garver said: "I see nothing in the photos that indicates those children were in the houses that our forces received fire from and subsequently destroyed with the airstrike." He did not speculate on where the dead children being mourned by family members after being pulled from the rubble of the bombed-out houses might have come from otherwise. Perhaps the al-Jalmoods kept them in cold storage for just such a propaganda opportunity.

All of this was back in the bad old days of George W. Bush. But it is still going on, and has been going on, throughout the tenure of the Great Continuer. And if the Nobel Peace Laureate has his way, it will keep going on. Read carefully the statement on the most recent raid by a PR mouthpiece for the invaders, where he bravely and boldly heaps all blame for any "collateral damage" on the colonial troops:

"This was an Iraqi-planned and -led counterterrorism operation," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, an American military spokesman, said in a statement. "The operation was enabled by U.S. support that included helicopters. Also, there was a small number of U.S. advisers taking part in the operation, although it was predominantly Iraqi forces, and they were in charge of all activities on the ground."

"Advisers." This is the new term-of-art for invasion forces. This is the word now being used by the Obama Administration and the Iraqi government in their relentless efforts to weasel out of the agreement to withdraw all American "military forces" from Iraq by the end of the year. This follows the line of the Peace Laureate’s earlier scam, when he claimed to have kept his promise to withdraw "all combat troops" from Iraq by simply renaming the tens of thousands of occupying soldiers left behind as "non-combat troops" – although they continued, and continue, to carry out combat missions. (And of course, the "withdrawal" agreement doesn’t include the thousands upon thousands of "security personnel" and mercenaries who will guard the vast embassy-fortress the invaders have built in the center of Baghdad.)

So we will no doubt see more of Ishaqi’s children shot and killed by occupiers and their colonial proxies in the months and years to come. We will no doubt see more villages and neighborhoods invaded in the dead of night by armed men creeping up on their houses, kicking down their doors, shooting, looting, breaking and beating, in this now-hidden, now-forgotten but still-ongoing act of mass murder.



[IDEM] Source

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2156-ishaqi-again-another-day-another-atrocity-in-the-endless-iraq-war.html




 

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"New" Iraq a Nightmare for Women, Minority Groups


By Denis Foynes

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56796

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 9, 2011 (IPS) - A United Nations report on Iraq says the human rights situation there remains fragile, and huge development challenges loom as the country transitions out of a near decade-long conflict.

Torture and poor judicial practices are widespread, says the report, released Monday by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

The report claims the 2,953 civilian deaths it attributed to violence in 2010 were mostly carried out by insurgent and terrorist groups.

It stressed that minorities, women and children suffered disproportionately from these abuses.

While there have been improvements in some areas of human rights, many challenges remain and some areas were actually worse off in 2010 than previous war-torn years.

"Particularly women's rights levels and standards have gone down. They suffer from widespread violence, especially from domestic violence," Rupert Colville, the spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told IPS.

"There is little legislation to prevent this from occurring and the criminal code in Iraq almost encourages these crimes. There needs to be laws in the region against domestic violence," Colville said.

The treatment of minorities was also heavily covered in the report.

Samer Muscati, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, told IPS, "Minorities have suffered hugely since 2003. We have also released similar two reports explaining this, as have many rights agencies."

"Kurds, Christians, Persians and Yarsans are among some the groups targeted for violence. This rise is caused by general insecurity and a rise in religious extremism," he said. "These groups are also targeted by desperate criminal gangs because they are believed to have huge wealth."

The murder in August 2010 of Luay Barham al-Malik by kidnappers despite the fact that his family had paid a 15,000-dollar ransom is just one example the report gives of this sort of criminal activity in the country.

According to the report, major problems plague law enforcement and the administration of justice in Iraq, especially respect for due process and the right to a fair trial.

While there has been some improvement in the brutal conditions within many detention facilities and prisons, incidents of cruelty and torture remain widely reported in the world's press.

"An over-reliance on confessions to convict encourages an atmosphere where the torture of detainees takes place," the report said.

It also pointed to "widespread poverty, economic stagnation, lack of opportunities, environmental degradation and an absence of basic services constitute 'silent' human rights violations that affect large sectors of the population."

These abuses are often overshadowed by the more heavily publicised issues of terrorism and insurgency.

The report also cited the questionable March 2010 parliamentary elections and the ensuing nine-plus months of stalemate as one source of Iraq's rights problems.

"It is believed that this fuelled instability, but it also contributed to a degree of inactivity in relation to implementing reforms and other measures aimed at ensuring the protection and provision of human rights to the Iraqi population," the report stated.

As Colville told IPS, "The report has a mixed scorecard that is slightly better than the 2007-2008 report, but it is still pretty appalling."

Asked how the problem can be effectively tackled, Colville stated that, "A functioning legal framework needs to be set but this is not all that needs to be done. Changing law isn't enough. Society in Iraq must change too and this will take time."

"We hope that the government will also address their other issues such as their rigorous use of the death penalty. This combined with the weakness of their system of law means there is a risk that many innocent civilians are being killed every year," he added.

Muscati of Human Rights Watch said that "the international community needs to assist Iraq to improve its human rights".

"The people also need to freely express themselves and be able to hold guilty persons accountable. A completely free press would also aid this," he said. "This would make injustice more difficult to carry out without being seen by the Iraqi people and the international community."

Asked by IPS if there was any realistic expectation that the situation would improve, Muscati responded, "I hope so, but it is hard to say with any sort of hope for accuracy. The situation is currently getting worse in many ways."

"The question is unanswerable - especially with the effects of the American forces' withdrawal. One would hope but the future of Iraq is truly anyone's guess," he said.

(END)

 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56796

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Iraq snapshot - August 8, 2011


The Common Ills


August 8, 2011



Monday, August 8, 2011.  Chaos and violence continue, Nouri gets punked, a War Criminal is released into civil society, the UN issues a status report on Iraq, house bombings are the new weapon fad in Iraq, Political Stalemate II continues, and more.
 
http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2011/08/iraq-snapshot_08.html