"The truth, always the truth--at all costs"
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| 1932 10/02/2004 Cancer in Middle East, WMDs, Depleted Uranium, Dershowitz Again Edited by Liz Burbank |
| Committing a war crime: Cancer cases in Iraq are increasing Iraqwar Michael Jansen, Jordan Times Thursday, September 30, 2004 http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=2&p=5990&s2=30 While Washington expresses concern that “terrorists” could explode a “dirty bomb” containing nuclear waste on a Western city, killing hundreds of people and leaving a radioactive residue which will cause cancer for years to come, the US is dropping “dirty” depleted uranium bunker bombs on Iraq and selling 500 of these devices to Israel. Depleted uranium (DU) is a radioactive by-product of uranium enrichment used in bunker-busting bombs, missiles, tank shells and armour piercing bullets. Radiation released by DU weapons is said to be 10 times more potent than that produced by nuclear testing. DU has a half-life of 4.51 billion years! Imagine what this is doing to the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East, as well as the American troops. Doesn't this sound a lot like Agent Orange from the Viet Nam War--only worse. All the time, the U.S. denies the reality of the danger to Iraqis and U.S. people. Perhaps it's time for Bush, Cheney,Rumsfeld and others to go spend some time in a DU chamber to see how they like it and what it will do to them. During the 1991 campaign in Iraq, the US and UK fired 944,000 DU rounds, or some 2,700 tonnes of DU tipped munitions, at Iraqi civilian and military targets. When they explode, DU weapons scatter fine radioactive particles which are carried by the wind and ingested by human beings, animals and plants. The indestructible particles last forever. Therefore, the areas where DU munitions has been deployed — the Middle East, the northern Indian subcontinent and the Balkans — have been contaminated with endlessly destructive radioactive dust. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimated that half a million people would die by the end of the 21st century due to radioactive debris and dust left in Iraq, which makes its way into the rivers, lakes and seas of the world and the atmosphere which surrounds it. While Jordan has expressed concern about possible contamination by airborne particles escaping from Israel's nuclear reactor, there is a far greater danger from DU dust blown across the desert from Iraq. Doug Rokke, ex-director of the US army's DU project in 1994 and 1995 and a former professor of environmental science at a Florida university, said: “They're using it now, in Fallujah; Baghdad is chockablock with DU — it's all over the place.” An Iraqi doctor specialising in blood disease at one of the capital's universities told this correspondent that thousands of Baghdadis had developed cancer since 1991 and warned that incidence of the disease will rise due to the use of DU munitions during the 2003 war. Dr Jenan Ali, a senior specialist at the Basra College of Medicine, said that in the decade after the 1991 war there was a 100 per cent rise in child leukaemia and a 242 per cent increase in all cancers in the region. Birth defects are also much higher than normal. Malignancies and defects have also soared in Afghanistan since the 2001 US war, but no statistics are available in that chaotic country. While the Pentagon uses DU munitions to save the lives of its troops, DU may be killing more than the number who would have died if this munitions had not been deployed. The use of DU in 1991 and 2003 is also considered responsible for malignancies in US veterans and birth defects amongst their children. While only 467 US troops were wounded during the 1991 war, of the nearly 600,000 discharged personnel one third are receiving disability compensation and another 25,000 cases are pending. The figure does not include those who have died. Amongst the 169,000 veterans of the current conflict, 16 per cent had applied for treatment by July 2004. Rokke, who unsuccessfully attempted to clean up Iraq after the first Gulf War, is amongst the victims. He went to Iraq a fit soldier but returned home with respiratory problems, cataracts and crumbling teeth, the latter due to DU exposure. Twenty of the personnel working on the project died, most of the rest are ill. A Pentagon report revealed last month that eight out of 20 men who served together during the 2003 invasion of Iraq now have malignancies. This group was apparently exposed only to DU and vaccines which do not cause cancer. The New York Daily News reported that four out of nine military police repatriated from Iraq had tested positive for DU contamination. Rokke, who discovered that DU contamination cannot be cleaned up following the 1991 conflict, called the use of DU munitions a “war crime”. He stated: “There is a moral point to be made here [about the deployment of these weapons in 2003]. This war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction — yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves. Such double standards are repellent.” According to an August 2002 UN report, the use of DU munitions breaches the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Genocide Convention, the Convention against Torture, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980, and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Rokke observed: “A nation's military personnel cannot wilfully contaminate any other nation, cannot cause harm to persons and the environment and then ignore the consequences of their actions.” This is precisely what three US administrations have done and continue to do. Since DU blockbusters are now being dropped on the restive towns of Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and Baqouba, death by cancer and leukaemia can be expected to linger in their streets and homes, the fields nearby, and to be carried far and wide by the prevailing winds and the Tigris River. The World Health Organisation says that the worldwide cancer rate could rise by 50 per cent by 2020, but (under pressure from the world's superpower?) claims that DU is not responsible. Experts critical of the use of this weapon insist that DU is a major factor. The most horrific aspect of the DU scandal is that the US military, the most powerful on the face of the earth, does not have to use DU weapons of mass destruction to defeat Washington's pathetic adversaries — poorly armed Bosnian Serb forces, scratch Taleban militias, pathetic Iraqi units weakened by more than two decades of warfare and 13 years of sanctions. DU contamination is a war crime which does not need to be committed. Cancer cases in Iraq are increasing, doctors say Report, IRIN, 29 September 2004 BAGHDAD, 29 September (IRIN) - A bag hooked up to a metal pole on wheels delivers chemotherapy medicine to Sura Najim, 42, as she lies in a bed at the country's leading radiation hospital in the capital, Baghdad. Najim knows that later she will get sick and feel weak, unable to get out of bed. Right now, however, the college professor is calm - able to talk about the breast cancer she is trying to beat. Already, she has had surgery to remove the cancer in one breast and several courses of chemotherapy over the last four months to make sure it has not spread. "I discovered a mass in my body and went to the doctor," Najim told IRIN. "She discovered that it was malignant, so I had to have an operation." Iraq's health care system seems able to handle its cancer patients at the moment, Dr Thikra Najim, a specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics, told IRIN. But the number of cases appears to be rising rapidly, especially for breast cancer, Najim said. It's unclear why this is, although it could be because of radiation left over from the 1991 Gulf War, she added. "Now we're seeing three or four cases every week. I think the number is increasing," Najim said. "This is disastrous. We have to study it." In fact, doctors are now seeing many more cases of cancer in general. About 4,000 patients per year used to come through the doors of the radiation hospital in Baghdad. So far this year they have seen about 7,000 patients, Dr Ahmed Abdul Jabhar, deputy director of the hospital, told IRIN. Cancers in the patients streaming through the hospital's doors each day appear to be unrelated to each other, Jabhar said, reading from the hospital's entry log. One patient has a cancerous tumour in his mouth; another has a lump in her breast; a third has brain cancer. In addition, leukaemia (a form of bone marrow cancer marked by an increase in white blood cells) cases appear to be increasing in southern Iraq, Jabhar said. Gastro-intestinal tumours and thyroid problems also seem to be increasing in the centre of the country, he noted. "We don't know if the rise is because there actually are more cases, or because of new diagnosis capabilities available to us," Jabhar said. Doctors in recent months have noticed an increase in a variety of radiation-related diseases, but few reliable statistics exist. A cancer department at the Ministry of Health has only this year's statistics for example, making it impossible to compare what's happening now to what has happened in the past. In general, however, it takes more than 20 years for people to get sick through radiation-related diseases after they have been exposed, Jabhar said. But such diseases can progress more rapidly if the exposure is higher. Children can also be more vulnerable - and the number of cases of childhood leukaemia has risen in the last few years. "More people seem to have cancer, but I was very surprised when I found out I had it," Iman Rubi Mohammed, 44, told IRIN, as she waited for treatment for cancer of the cervix in the radiology room of the hospital. She said she went to the doctor after getting sharp pains in her abdomen. Now there is a two-to-three month waiting list to be treated by the radiology machines, Jabhar said, because the number of patients is increasing. Doctors also treat cancer with hormone therapy, he said, and they're always worried that they will run out of drugs. In Tuwaitha, 18 km south of Baghdad, where nuclear research went on for years, many residents appear to have suffered some ill effects, Bushra Ali Ahmed, director of the Radiation Protection Centre in Baghdad, told IRIN. Of 4,000 residents who had their blood tested in five villages surrounding Tuwaitha, about 2,000 were found to have higher than normal white blood cell counts, Ahmed said. She is also testing the blood of at least 10 residents in Baghdad to use them as a control group. "We can't say it's from radiation, but their immunity is lower," Ahmed said. "Radiation can come from many things. There are many sources of contamination in Iraq now." Ahmed has just finished a Ministry of Environment study about pollution in Iraq. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) is starting a US $4.7 million pilot project to investigate environment "hot spots" and help with cleaning them up, ranging from chemical spills to oil discharges. UN workers will help Iraq reduce pollution threats to human health, wildlife and the wider environment, Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director, said in a statement. "It's not good to say something about this until you know for sure where the contamination is coming from," Ahmed said. "We need more machines and materials to study this." http://electroniciraq.net/news/1664.shtml http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/tiki-read_article.p hp?articleId=24815 ========= September 30, 2004 When You Have Breast Cancer in Gaza One Out of Every Nine By GIDEON LEVY http://www.counterpunch.org/levy09302004.html One out of every nine women gets breast cancer. There are doctors who say that statistic has worsened lately and now stands at one out of every eight. The disease is particularly violent in younger women and the primary growth in the breast spreads rapidly to the liver, the lungs, the bones and the brain. Is there anything worse than being a young woman with cancer whose chances are slim? It turns out that there is - being a young Palestinian woman with cancer whose chances are slim. For 10 days now, F., a 28-year-old resident of Gaza, has been trying to get to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer for urgent chemotherapy in the oncology department. The story of what has happened to her during these 10 awful days sounds unbelievable, even to someone who has already heard horrible stories. The reality has succeeded in superseding even what the sickest imagination could invent. F. has been undergoing treatment at Sheba's oncology department for many months: she has had surgery twice, radiation and chemotherapy. In Gaza, there is not a single oncology department and F. is not allowed to go to Egypt for treatment; she is one of the tens of thousands of Palestinians to whom Israel has refused to issue identity cards because they were not in the territories at the very beginning of the occupation. Without papers and without treatment in Gaza, F. is totally dependent on Israel's good graces. About two months ago, she was hospitalized at Sheba for several weeks and she had the chemotherapeutic drug Taxol injected into her veins, which reduced her suffering considerably. The attitude toward her at the hospital was admirable. F. was liked by everyone around her. Israel prevented members of her family from being at her side for most of the time she was hospitalized, and she was left all by herself after the operations and during the period of radiation treatments. A handful of Israeli women, among them one of the activists of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, tried to relieve her loneliness and her suffering. Each of her entrances into Israel was accompanied by hassles and humiliations. One time they demanded of her father a deposit of NIS 30,000 so that he could accompany her. F. was supposed to have returned to Sheba for treatment on September 14. There was a closure and her application was refused. They promised her a permit for September 19. In the meantime, her condition deteriorated, her pain increased and her breathing became labored. She contacted the physicians' association and begged to be allowed to return to the hospital. At Sheba they said she should come as soon as possible. On September 14, Physicians for Human Rights applied to the humanitarian hotline of the Liaison and Coordination Administration with a request that she receive an entry permit. The permit arrived only on the following day at 6 in the evening, restricted to that same day and without an accompanying person. It was evening and F. was no longer able to travel by herself. The following day the validity of the permit had already expired. At the association they decided to wait until Sunday, for which the permit had already been promised. On Sunday, the permit did not arrive until evening. In turns out that it was necessary to submit a renewed application. On Monday there was a delay on the Palestinian side, which was late in resubmitting her medical documents. Her changes of going out on Monday were scotched, as well. Last Tuesday, at 3:30 in the afternoon, the telephone call came with the news that a permit had been given for the patient and her mother. F. set out for the roadblock with her mother. For hours she sat debilitated on the ground and waited. Finally she was called to go through the metal detector. The soldiers shouted to her from a distance that she had "something in her chest" and ordered her to strip in front of them. She stood there wearing only an undergarment, her mother burst out crying at the sight of her sick, humiliated daughter and the soldiers scolded her to shut up. Finally an officer came, reprimanded the soldiers and ordered F. to get dressed immediately. F. has had a mastectomy. At 8 P.M. the Liaison and Coordination Administration informed Physicians for Human Rights that there was "a security problem" with F. The soldiers suspected her of carrying explosives in her chest. For some reason they had not arrested her, but had sent her home. Apparently it was the prosthetic breast that had set off the metal detector. From that moment a danse macabre began, the end of which is not in sight. MK Yossi Sarid (Yahad), one of the few Knesset members who has taken an interest and tried to help, contacted the defense minister's bureau that same evening. At the bureau they asked for documents concerning F.'s prosthesis. The minister's adviser phoned Dr. Danny Rosen, who knows F. well, and asked about the kind of material on her body. At the bureau they also asked for a guarantee in F.'s handwriting that she would come to the roadblock without the prosthesis. This guarantee was given. Day followed day, and yet another phone call and yet another request for a form, and F. is still stuck in Gaza, her suffering increasing and her chances running out. The Israel Defense Forces spokesman says that, "in light of a number of attempts by terrorists to enter Israel in the guise of needing medical treatment, the IDF must be extra cautious with regard to anyone who does not pass the security check, even if he has the appropriate medical documents in his possession. The claim concerning inappropriate conduct by the soldiers at the crossing point has been investigated and found to be without any basis. However, the consideration of the request by the senior command levels is still underway." No danger of a suicide terrorist can justify such behavior. It is possible to protect ourselves against female terrorists without losing our humanity. F.'s story is not exceptional, even if part of it is particularly shocking; there are hundreds of Palestinian patients in a similar condition and every injustice always has a security excuse. There is terror, everyone is only carrying out orders and they are going by the book. But a book that prevents medical treatment to dying patients, hassles them and humiliates them, is a wicked book, and a society in which only the metal detector speaks is a sick society. Gideon Levy writes for Ha'aretz, where this essay originally appeared. ========= September 30, 2004 The Harvard Law Professor Who Sat On An Israeli Assassination Target Review Panel The Jihad of Alan Dershowitz By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN Law Professor, Washburn University School of Law http://www.counterpunch.org/ If to dispute well is law's chiefest end, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has honed this ability to a stunning craft. In high-profile cases, such as O. J. Simpson, Doctor Dershowitz, a seasoned criminal law jurist, serves as a media-savvy lawyer determined to defend "the guilty." Less well known, however, is that this advocacy Mephistopheles thrives on inventing unpopular, counter-intuitive, and even unjust exceptions to international law--a subject he normally does not teach. These exceptions--mutually folded in each other's orb---allow the torturing of terrorists, the assassinations of their leaders, and the demolition of their family homes. What is most intriguing is the contempt that Dershowitz has for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its current President (the Chinese judge) whom he calls a thug, discarding the language of professional courtesy. Somewhat intrigued by his incendiary views daringly, and sometimes crudely, expressed in books and newspaper columns, I requested to interview Dershowitz, an interview he granted promptly and generously. We both taped the interview, I for no other reason but to save as a souvenir. I came out of the interview with the clear impression that--setting aside the civil liberties concerns that inform his criminal defense rhetoric--Dershowitz concocts these exceptions not merely to embellish his ivory tower but to proactively defend, and sometimes shape, Israeli policies in occupied Palestine. For example, Dershowitz's contempt for the ICJ has deepened ever since the Court decided to rule on the legality of Israel's separation wall. Comparing the ICJ to a Mississippi court in the 1930s, Dershowitz contends that the ICJ is a credible court for the rest of the world but not for Israel, just as the Mississippi court was a just tribunal for whites but not for blacks. This argument, in its analogical enormity, paints the ICJ as an exceptionally anti-Israel body. Furthermore, Dershowitz challenges the neutrality of ICJ judges, arguing that they are shameless mouthpieces of their governments. When asked to comment on whether he holds the same view about British and American judges on the Court, Dershowitz stepped back to distinguish between the Court and its judges, now saying that the ICJ is bigoted but many of its judges are not. This distinction made no sense to me, since all judges on the Court, except one, held the separation wall to be illegal. Dershowitz's exceptional defense of Israel is not confined to academic criticisms of the ICJ (or the International Red Cross or the United Nations). In the interview, Dershowitz, who opposes the death penalty, revealed that he had sat on the Israeli assassination committee that reviews evidence before terrorists are targeted and killed. This "due process" hearing is designed to reduce the raw charge that state-sponsored assassinations are blatantly unlawful. Dershowitz favors targeted assassination of terrorist leaders "involved in planning or approving on-going murderous activities." Under this protean standard, it is unclear whether spiritual and political leaders who favor terrorist violence but do not materially participate in specific terrorist acts may also be assassinated. These niceties aside, the idea of a Harvard law professor sitting on an occupying state's assassination committee would be, to many in the legal academy, a trifle perplexing. What rattles his many critics the most, however, is the innovative exception Dershowitz draws for the Convention against Torture (1987). The Convention prohibits all forms of torture and provides for no exception. In fact, the prohibition against torture has attained the status of jus cogens--the peremptory norms of international law that cannot be abandoned or altered. Dershowitz confesses to know all this. Yet he makes an empirical argument to carve out an exception. Since torture cannot be eliminated in the real world, he argues: "Ay, think so still, 'til experience change thy mind." Dershowitz proposes that the legal system regulate torture by requiring state officials to obtain a judicial warrant before torturing. Despite Dershowitz's connections and influence, Israel refused to launch the proposed torture warrant, although it embraced the idea of exception to the Convention it had signed. However, when more than 90 percent of the Palestinian security detainees began to be tortured, the Israeli Supreme Court put an end to the fledgling exception. Undeterred by such judicial rebuffs, Dershowitz continues to manufacture legal exceptions to shore up the universally condemned Israeli practices, such as bulldozing the family homes of terror suspects. Calling it property damage, he apparently dismisses the sanctity, the intimacy, and the memories attached to a family home, anybody's family home. As if demolition of family homes is a minor punishment, Dershowitz is willing to pull down even the entire "villages of suicide bombers." He thinks perhaps that it takes a village to raise a suicide bomber. It does. When her entire village has been grabbed by the neck and choked, some kid (a "terrorist") is surely going to be mad as hell. Despite his legalistic jihad for Israel's security and despite his employment of the Harvard Law School stature to propose questionable exceptions to international law, Dershowitz does not completely throw away the sense of limits. For example, he opposes Nathan Lewin, a prominent Washington lawyer and a federal judge hopeful, who blatantly argues, contrary to popular feelings of the Jewish community, that family members of suicide bombers be executed. By no means is Dershowitz an incorrigible ideologue nor is he morally sightless. His reading of international law is most certainly flawed and he needs "to settle in his studies." His intellectual honesty is nonetheless beyond doubt. He is what he thinks. He does not duck hard questions. And he does all this with an inexhaustible capacity to swallow contradictions. At the end of the play, however, when all arguments have been made, when all exceptions have been put to rest, and when the nation that launched a thousand missiles has been defended, Dershowitz relaxes his grip with a disarming sense of humor expressed through borrowed jokes. In his book Why Terrorism Works (2002), for example, he tells readers how he, as a boy, pondered over difficult hypothetical scenarios such as this: "If you were up to your neck in a vat of cat vomit and somebody threw a pile of dog poop on your face, would you duck?" One may relish Dershowtiz's for his wits, but only to wonder at the unlawful things he permits. Ali Khan is a professor at Washburn University School of Law in Kansas. His book A Theory of International Terrorism will be published in 2005. He can be reached at: ali.khan@washburn.edu ========= Teachers' pests By Aryeh Dayan Fri., October 01, 2004 Tishrei 16, 5765 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/483006.html The Education Ministry has finally confirmed that all appointments in Arab sector education are overseen by the Shin Bet. Despite opposition to the practice, the ministry has no intention of changing it About a week before the start of the current school year, on August 24, the director general of the Education Ministry, Ronit Tirosh, conducted a briefing with the editors of local Arab newspapers. Near the end of the meeting, after she responded to many questions about the neglect of the education system in the Arab sector with respect to budgets and school buildings, she was asked a question about another type of discrimination. One of the journalists asked Tirosh: Don't you think the time has come to cancel the procedures rooted in the days of the military government, under which the Shin Bet security service closely oversees the appointment of every teacher, principal and supervisor in all Arab government schools? The fact that the Shin Bet is authorized to veto any candidate for an educational position without explanation, the Arab journalist argued/asked, constitutes a serious violation of human rights and creates a reality that is inconsistent with the principles of democracy. Tirosh's answer surprised those who were present at the briefing. Based on their experience in similar meetings in the past, and after raising this matter with various senior officials, they expected that she would also provide an ambiguous and evasive response that would blur the very fact of Shin Bet supervision over the ministry's system of appointments. However, Tirosh officially and openly confirmed that every appointment of an Arab educator is submitted to the Shin Bet for approval. She defended this procedure and even announced that neither she nor Education Minister Limor Livnat has any intention of working to change it. [cont]... ========= The true face of Iraqi resistance We will all pay the price if Labour today backs continued occupation Sami Ramadani http://207.44.245.159/article6984.htm 09/30/04 "The Guardian" -- Rarely have delegates to a party conference had such potential to influence the course of history as they do today. In Labour's debate on the occupation of Iraq, the party will confront the biggest question facing the country: will Britain continue to follow the lead of President Bush, or will it change course and help to give the Iraqi people the chance to determine their own future? Ominously for the prospects of Labour and the government - as well as for the future of Iraq - it looks likely that delegates will vote to back the continued bloody occupation of the land of my birth to save the prime minister's political skin. There are now two Iraq wars: the first is being fought with helicopter gunships and cluster bombs along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates; the second is being fought here in Britain and in the pre-election US. This is a propaganda war in which the hundreds of Iraqis killed every week by US bombardment fail to make the headlines, while the horrifying images provided by a Jordanian kidnapper and killer of British and US contractors is portrayed as the true face of Iraqi resistance. Thus the real human suffering, and the reality of the widespread resistance to occupation, is hidden from view, while bombing what US generals call Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's "supporters' hideouts" is portrayed as a necessity. And so Falluja, a besieged city of 300,000 people, is under daily aerial attack, and parts of Sadr City, the poorest neighbourhood of Baghdad, are being reduced to rubble. Many towns and villages across Iraq are encircled, and thousands of people arrested to crush popular resistance to occupation. The vast majority of Iraqis reject Zarqawi and his ilk - as do the resistance and its supporters in Falluja, Sadr City and across Iraq. Many even suspect that the occupation forces are somehow encouraging the likes of Zarqawi, or at least failing to prevent their crimes, as a way of obscuring the fact that most Iraqis now actively support a patriotic and widespread resistance movement. The occupation forces have admitted that the attacks on them by the resistance rose last month to 2,700. And how many of these 2,700 attacks a month were claimed by Zarqawi? Six. Six headline-grabbing, TV-dominating, stomach-churning moments. Just as Iraq's 25 million people were reduced, in the public's mind, to the threat from weapons of mass destruction, ready to be unleashed within 45 minutes, the resistance is now being reduced to a single hoodlum. Meanwhile, in the name of building democracy, the Iraqi people's democratic rights have been crushed. Instead of an elected constitutional assembly we have a CIA-appointed puppet government. Trade union leaders have been detained by the occupation forces and their offices destroyed. The US proconsul Paul Bremer, and later the US-appointed Ayad Allawi regime, have reintroduced a 1987 law of Saddam's banning strikes in the state sector. Iraqi workers are nevertheless fighting back. Last month the Southern Oil Company Union staged a successful strike to halt oil exports and help force the US to lift its bombardment of Najaf. But Labour's conference will hear little or nothing of this, whether from Tony Blair and his ministers or from pro-occupation Iraqis masquerading as supporters of free trade unionism and self-determination in Iraq. Such insidious misrepresentation of reality helps keep people of conscience in Britain and the US from having sleepless nights about the children daily killed in their name or the trade unionists hounded by Saddamist torturers enlisted by the occupation. One might regret this "collateral damage", the government argues, but it is all in a good cause: fighting not against the Iraqi people, but to save them from Zarqawi. Britain is morally and politically responsible for the current US bombardment of Iraqi cities. Indeed, Britain's role in the war is now politically decisive. The announcement of a phased British withdrawal, to be completed by the end of the year, would be the desperately needed move to force President Bush to change direction. The impact of such a decision on the US public would be huge. Blair, speaking on behalf of the British people, played a key role in helping Bush dupe America about WMD. Were that support withdrawn, Bush would either have to change direction or risk losing the election. The impact on Democrat candidate Kerry's campaign would surely be no less dramatic, forcing him to accept that the Iraqi people's struggle for freedom is unstoppable. Once free, the Iraqi people would certainly sweep away Zarqawi's tiny gang, who appear to have little trouble slipping in and out of Iraq under the occupation regime. Labour delegates have it in their gift today to hold their leaders to account and uphold the cause of peace and self-determination. If they fail to seize that chance, we are all likely to pay the price. Sami Ramadani was a political refugee from Saddam Hussein's regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University sami.ramadani@londonmet.ac.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1316000,00.html ========= More Lies From the Five-Sided Propaganda Factory David H. Hackworth You‚d think a Hollywood screenwriter scripted the „Saving Private Jessica Lynch‰ spectacle the Pentagon produced last year. But that five-sided propaganda factory with its battalions of well-trained deceivers came up with this particular fairytale ˆ about how a Special Ops unit snatched a beautiful blonde American heroine from Iraqi fiends ˆ all on their own (...) In its micro way, the Lynch scam symbolizes the miasma of deception surrounding the! invasion and the ugly unsolvable occupation already causing the direst consequences to our national security... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info?p=5970 ======== September 28, 2004 Iraq’s CIA Election http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?p=331#more-331 Sean McCormack says the Bushites want “a level playing field” for the upcoming Iraqi elections. In other words, they want to determine the election’s outcome. How best to do this? Send in the CIA. Once upon a time, before Bush was selected and “everything changed,” the CIA went about its dirty business under the cover of national secrecy. Now we read about what they plan to do on the pages of Time Magazine. “U.S. officials tell TIME that the Bush team ran into trouble with another plan involving [Iraq’s staged] elections—a secret “finding” written several months ago proposing a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favored by Washington. A source says the idea was to help such candidates—whose opponents might be receiving covert backing from other countries, like Iran—but not necessarily to go so far as to rig the elections,” Time reports. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi “came unglued” after she learned about the plan for “the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections,” according to Time. She put in an irate call to Condi Rice and the plan was “scaled back.” Note that it was not cancelled. It was scaled back. Here’s a short list of CIA meddling in the elections of other countries, excerpted from Steve Kangas’ Timeline of CIA Atrocities: 1948 Italy—The CIA corrupts democratic elections in Italy, where Italian communists threaten to win the elections. The CIA buys votes, broadcasts propaganda, threatens and beats up opposition leaders, and infiltrates and disrupts their organizations. It works—the communists are defeated. 1953 Iran—CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo. 1954 Guatemala—CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years. 1954-1958 North Vietnam—CIA officer Edward Lansdale spends four years trying to overthrow the communist government of North Vietnam, using all the usual dirty tricks. The CIA also attempts to legitimize a tyrannical puppet regime in South Vietnam, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem. These efforts fail to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese because the Diem government is opposed to true democracy, land reform and poverty reduction measures. The CIA’s continuing failure results in escalating American intervention, culminating in the Vietnam War. 1956 Hungary—Radio Free Europe incites Hungary to revolt by broadcasting Khruschev’s Secret Speech, in which he denounced Stalin. It also hints that American aid will help the Hungarians fight. This aid fails to materialize as Hungarians launch a doomed armed revolt, which only invites a major Soviet invasion. The conflict kills 7,000 Soviets and 30,000 Hungarians. 1957-1973 Laos—The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections. The problem is the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an “Armee Clandestine” of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. starts bombing, dropping more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves. 1959 Haiti—The U.S. military helps “Papa Doc” Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. He creates his own private police force, the “Tonton Macoutes,” who terrorize the population with machetes. They will kill over 100,000 during the Duvalier family reign. The U.S. does not protest their dismal human rights record. 1961 Dominican Republic—The CIA assassinates Rafael Trujillo, a murderous dictator Washington has supported since 1930. Trujillo’s business interests have grown so large (about 60 percent of the economy) that they have begun competing with American business interests. Ecuador—The CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President Jose Velasco to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with its own man. Congo (Zaire)—The CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba. However, public support for Lumumba’s politics runs so high that the CIA cannot clearly install his opponents in power. Four years of political turmoil follow. 1963 Dominican Republic—The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Juan Bosch in a military coup. The CIA installs a repressive, right-wing junta. Ecuador—A CIA-backed military coup overthrows President Arosemana, whose independent (not socialist) policies have become unacceptable to Washington. A military junta assumes command, cancels the 1964 elections, and begins abusing human rights. 1964 Brazil—A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in history. General Castelo Branco will create Latin America’s first death squads, or bands of secret police who hunt down “communists” for torture, interrogation and murder. Often these “communists” are no more than Branco’s political opponents. Later it is revealed that the CIA trains the death squads. 1965 Indonesia—The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA has been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, will massacre between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being “communist.” The CIA supplies the names of countless suspects. Dominican Republic—A popular rebellion breaks out, promising to reinstall Juan Bosch as the country’s elected leader. The revolution is crushed when U.S. Marines land to uphold the military regime by force. The CIA directs everything behind the scenes. Greece—With the CIA’s backing, the king removes George Papandreous as prime minister. Papandreous has failed to vigorously support U.S. interests in Greece. Congo (Zaire)—A CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko as dictator. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions. 1967 Greece—A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the government two days before the elections. The favorite to win was George Papandreous, the liberal candidate. During the next six years, the “reign of the colonels"—backed by the CIA—will usher in the widespread use of torture and murder against political opponents. When a Greek ambassador objects to President Johnson about U.S. plans for Cypress, Johnson tells him: “Fuck your parliament and your constitution.” 1970 Cambodia—The CIA overthrows Prince Sahounek, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, who immediately throws Cambodian troops into battle. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge, which achieves power in 1975 and massacres millions of its own people. 1971 Bolivia—After half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Torres. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then tortured, raped and executed. 1973 Chile—The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader. The problems begin when Allende nationalizes American-owned firms in Chile. ITT offers the CIA $1 million for a coup (reportedly refused). The CIA replaces Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, who will torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left. 1975 Australia—The CIA helps topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Edward Whitlam. The CIA does this by giving an ultimatum to its Governor-General, John Kerr. Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, exercises his constitutional right to dissolve the Whitlam government. The Governor-General is a largely ceremonial position appointed by the Queen; the Prime Minister is democratically elected. The use of this archaic and never-used law stuns the nation. 1980 El Salvador—The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with President Carter “Christian to Christian” to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter refuses. Shortly afterwards, right-wing leader Roberto D’Aubuisson has Romero shot through the heart while saying Mass. The country soon dissolves into civil war, with the peasants in the hills fighting against the military government. The CIA and U.S. Armed Forces supply the government with overwhelming military and intelligence superiority. CIA-trained death squads roam the countryside, committing atrocities like that of El Mazote in 1982, where they massacre between 700 and 1000 men, women and children. By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans will be killed. 1989 Panama—The U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega. Noriega has been on the CIA’s payroll since 1966, and has been transporting drugs with the CIA’s knowledge since 1972. By the late 80s, Noriega’s growing independence and intransigence have angered Washingtonâ€∫ so out he goes. 1990 Haiti—Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy candidates, leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote. After only eight months in power, however, the CIA-backed military deposes him. More military dictators brutalize the country, as thousands of Haitian refugees escape the turmoil in barely seaworthy boats. As popular opinion calls for Aristide’s return, the CIA begins a disinformation campaign painting the courageous priest as mentally unstable. Kangas comments: “The CIA’s response to this growing knowledge and criticism follows a typical historical pattern. (Indeed, there are remarkable parallels to the Medieval Church’s fight against the Scientific Revolution.) The first journalists and writers to reveal the CIA’s criminal behavior were harassed and censored if they were American writers, and tortured and murdered if they were foreigners. (See Philip Agee’s On the Run for an example of early harassment.) However, over the last two decades the tide of evidence has become overwhelming, and the CIA has found that it does not have enough fingers to plug every hole in the dike. This is especially true in the age of the Internet, where information flows freely among millions of people. Since censorship is impossible, the Agency must now defend itself with apologetics. Now they don’t even bother with apologetics. Instead, they leak their plans to a compliant corporate media, and the Bushites follow up with the standard “war against terrorism” platitudes. Note the Bushite caveat above: the CIA finds it necessary to subvert Iraq’s elections because if they don’t Iran will. “The CIA has courted right-wing dictators because they allow wealthy Americans to exploit the country’s cheap labor and resources. But poor and middle-class Americans pay the price whenever they fight the wars that stem from CIA actions, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Panama.” More than 1,000 of them have paid the ultimate price so far. Even more will pay after Bush’s staged elections next year. Bush (after he is re-selected in our own staged election) will redouble his effort to kill Iraqis. He will say the “terr’ists” are opposing a democratically elected government. Of course, there is the possibility there will be no elections come January, or there will be limited elections, as Rumsfeld has hinted, in certain parts of the country (outside the “no-go” zones). One thing is certain: Iraqis will continue to resist the occupation. So-called elections will not make a lick of difference. Not even the CIA can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. ======= John Pilger on why media ignored Iraq in the 1990s Even before the 2003 war, we were attacking Iraqi civilians with our inhumane economic sanctions. Yet where were the media protesting against this injustice? John Pilger http://207.44.245.159/article6986.htm 10/04/04 "New Statesman" -- In October 1999, I stood in a ward of dying children in Baghdad with Denis Halliday, who the previous year had resigned as assistant secretary general of the United Nations. He said: "We are waging a war through the United Nations on the people of Iraq. We're targeting civilians. Worse, we're targeting children . . . What is this all about?" Halliday had been 34 years with the UN. As an international civil servant much respected in the field of "helping people, not harming them", as he put it, he had been sent to Iraq to implement the oil-for-food programme, which he subsequently denounced as a sham. "I am resigning," he wrote, "because the policy of economic sanctions is . . . destroying an entire society. Five thousand children are dying every month. I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide." Halliday's successor, Hans von Sponeck, another assistant secretary general with more than 30 years' service, also resigned in protest. Jutta Burghardt, the head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, followed them, saying she could no longer tolerate what was being done to the Iraqi people. Their collective action was unprecedented; yet it received only passing media attention. There was no serious inquiry by journalists into their grave charges against the British and American governments, which in effect ran the embargo. Von Sponeck's disclosure that the sanctions restricted Iraqis to living on little more than $100 a year was not reported. "Deliberate strangulation", he called it. Neither was the fact that, up to July 2002, more than $5bn worth of humanitarian supplies, which had been approved by the UN sanctions committee and paid for by Iraq, were blocked by George W Bush, with Tony Blair's backing. They included food products, medicines and medical equipment, as well as items vital for water and sanitation, agriculture and education. The cost in lives was staggering. Between 1991 and 1998, reported Unicef, 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died. "If you include adults," said Halliday, "the figure is now almost certainly well over a million." In 1996, in an interview on the American current affairs programme 60 Minutes, Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, was asked: "We have heard that half a million children have died . . . is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it." The television network CBS has since refused to allow the videotape of that interview to be shown again, and the reporter will not discuss it. Halliday and von Sponeck have long been personae non gratae in most of the US and British media. What these whistle-blowers have revealed is far too unpalatable: not only was the embargo a great crime against humanity, it actually reinforced Saddam Hussein's control. The reason why so many Iraqis feel bitter about the invasion and occupation is that they remember the Anglo-American embargo as a crippling, medieval siege that prevented them from overthrowing their dictatorship. This is almost never reported in Britain. Halliday appeared on BBC2's Newsnight soon after he resigned. I watched the presenter Jeremy Paxman allow Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office minister, to abuse him as an "apologist for Saddam". Hain's shameful performance was not surprising. On the eve of this year's Labour party conference, he dismissed Iraq as a "fringe issue". Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, wrote in the New Statesman recently that some journalists "consider it bad form to engage in public debate about anything to do with ethics or standards, never mind the fundamental purpose of journalism". It was a welcome departure from the usual clubbable stuff that passes for media comment but which rarely addresses "the fundamental purpose of journalism" - and especially not its collusive, lethal silences. "When truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." He might have been referring to the silence over the devastating effects of the embargo. It is a silence that casts journalists as accessories, just as their silence contributed to an illegal and unprovoked invasion of a defenceless country. Yes, there was plenty of media noise prior to the invasion, but Blair's spun version dominated, and truth-tellers were sidelined. Scott Ritter was the UN's senior weapons inspector in Iraq. Ritter began his whistle-blowing more than five years ago when he said: "By 1998, [Iraq's] chemical weapons infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed by Unscom . . . The biological weapons programme was gone, the major facilities eliminated . . . The long-range ballistic missile programme was completely eliminated. If I had to quantify Iraq's threat, I would say [it is] zero." Ritter's truth was barely acknowledged. Like Halliday and von Sponeck, he was almost never mentioned on the television news, the principal source of most people's information. The studied obfuscation of Hans Blix was far more acceptable as the "balancing voice". That Blix, like Kofi Annan, was playing his own political games with Washington was never questioned. Up to the fall of Baghdad, the misinformation and lies of Bush and Blair were channelled, amplified and legitimised by journalists, notably by the BBC, which defines its political coverage by the pronouncements, events and personalities of the "village" of Whitehall and Westminster. Andrew Gilligan broke this rule in his outstanding reporting from Baghdad and later his disclosure of Blair's most important deception. It is instructive that the most sustained attacks on him came from his fellow journalists. In the crucial 18 months before Iraq was attacked, when Bush and Blair were secretly planning the invasion, famous, well-paid journalists became little more than channels, debriefers of the debriefers - what the French call fonctionnaires. The paramount role of real journalists is not to channel, but to challenge, not to fall silent, but to expose. There were honourable exceptions, notably Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian and the irrepressible Robert Fisk in the Independent. Two newspapers, the Mirror and the Independent, broke ranks. Apart from Gilligan and one or two others, broadcasters failed to reflect the public's own rising awareness of the truth. In commercial radio, a leading journalist who raised too many questions was instructed to "tone down the anti-war stuff because the advertisers won't like it". In the United States, in the so-called mainstream of what is constitutionally the freest press in the world, the line held, with the result that Bush's lies were believed by the majority of the population. American journalists are now apologising, but it is too late. The US military is out of control in Iraq, bombarding densely populated areas with impunity. How many Iraqi families like Kenneth Bigley's are grieving? We do not experience their anguish, or hear their appeals for mercy. According to a recent estimate, roughly 37,000 Iraqis have died in this grotesque folly. Charles Lewis, the former star CBS reporter who now runs the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington, DC, told me he was in no doubt that, had his colleagues done their job rather than acted as ciphers, the invasion would not have taken place. Such is the power of the modern media; it is a power we should reclaim from those subverting it. John Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation will be shown on ITV1 on Wednesday 6 October at 11pm This article first appeared in the New Statesman. ======= BUYING THEIR PUPPET MASTERS' DREAM? Iraq rebel cities to be retaken in Oct - minister 29 Sep 2004 15:18:25 GMT http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IBO958515.htm BAGHDAD, Sept 29 (Reuters) - U.S. and Iraqi forces will retake rebel-held cities in Iraq in October, Defence Minister Hazim al-Shalaan told Reuters on Wednesday. "You wait and see what we are going to do. We are going to take all these cities in October," Shalaan said. The western cities of Falluja and Ramadi, as well as some parts of Baghdad and the town of Samarra, north of the capital, are effectively controlled by insurgents. The U.S. military has previously said it will retake these areas by the end of the year so elections can go ahead as scheduled in January. U.S. commanders say they are waiting until Iraqi forces are large enough and sufficiently trained for the offensive. ======= BUT IT'S OK THE PUPPET IS A CIA ASSET?! Lawmaker expresses "dismay" that White House allegedly wrote Allawi speech: "I want to express my profound dismay about reports that officials from your administration and your reelection campaign were 'heavily involved' in writing parts of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's speech," California Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote in a letter to President George W. Bush. http://207.44.245.159/article6987.htm ======= EVEN THE PUPPETS ARE REBELLING... Continued U.S. Airstrikes in Baghdad Draw Criticism: Interim president of Iraq likens the tactics to Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip: President Ghazi Ajil Yawer said the U.S. strikes were viewed by the Iraqi people as "collective punishment" against towns and neighborhoods. http://207.44.245.159/article6981.htm |
