MAY LOVE PREVAIL ON EARTH
April 17, 2004
Veracity Series #4: Fallujah Revisited
Hello everyone
Here is another large compilation highlighting the extent and random cruelty of American soldiers worst ever random killings done several days ago in Fallujah. I feel it is important to expose such difficult-to-contemplate material because these actions cannot be ignored nor made into banalities as the Bush Administration has been trying to do along with most Western media. The fact is that if current strenuously fragile negotiations underway in Iraq fail to bring the US military regime military onslaught against mostly civilians and the extremist attacks against the occupiers to a permanent halt, the situation could fast degenerate into a country-wide bloodbath reminiscent - in worst! - of the infamous genocide in Rwanda. Both sides need to show resolute restraint and peaceful negotiations must succeed to bring about liveable compromises that will undoubtedly appear unpalatable to both sides and yet would seem to be the only way out of this orgy of violence and punishments of which the civilian population is bearing the brunt, and by a large measure.
May Peace prevail in Iraq
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
P.S. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has been having premonitory dreams and feelings lately regarding any major imminent "event" in the US... Please make sure to read "The Draft Is Coming Back!" below... How about a military dictatorship under Herr Bush with that? "Area 51 Microbiologist Ready to Talk" below is quite disturbing too!
Free subscription to such compilations by sending a blank email to earthrainbownetwork-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
This compilation is archived at http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/Archives2004/Veracity4.htm
"The United States is now engaged in a savage and brutal occupation against a vastly outgunned enemy with the civilian population as their primary target. As the anger, resentment, and resistance to the occupation has grown, the level of barbarism which is taking shape increasingly resembles those carried out by Nazi Germany against its enemies. The U.S. has committed and will likely continue to engage in terrorist atrocities and war crimes with ever greater fervor to suppress this legitimate and growing resistance."
- Thomas Wheeler, taken from "Some People Push Back" below
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. But when war becomes literally continuous - Tenet says years needed to combat al-Qaida -, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be."
- Orwell's 1984 or Bush's 2004?
Worthy of Your Attention
Bush is a Moron website
http://www.bushisamoron.org
This is what Bush will not let us see, forward it to others.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1395585
Recommended by "Theresa Lavoie" teelavoie@earthlink.net>
Information Clearinghouse
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
Over 100 Articles / Links Published every day!
http://LoveEarth.net
IF YOU WANT TO BE MESMERIZED BY AN AMAZING SINGER AND MUSICIAN, WATCH ANI DIFRANCO PLAYING IN A BENEFIT CONCERT IN OREGON ON APRIL 7 FOR DENNIS KUCINICH AT http://kucinich.us/oregontrail.php
CONTENTS
1. Heads Up... from Michael Moore
2. U.S. Tactics Condemned by British Officers
3. Some People Push Back
4. An Iraqi Intifada
5. When Puppets Pull the Strings
6. Refugees tell of rising anger in Fallujah
7. Deaths of scores of mercenaries not reported
8. Inside the fire
9. The Draft Is Coming Back! (For boys and girls age 18--26)
10. Unasked Questions (About 140 Saudis allowed to fly out of the US 2 days after 9-11)
11. Area 51 Microbiologist Ready to Talk
12. Americans Slaughtering Women & Children In Fallujah
See also:
Hamas chief killed in air strike (April 17)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3635755.stm
The head of the militant Islamic movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Abdul Aziz Rantissi, has been killed in an attack on his vehicle. Mr Rantissi was driving his car in a Gaza suburb as an Israeli helicopter fired missiles at it, witnesses say. At least two other people were also killed and several more injured.
AP: Book Alleges Secret Iraq War Plan (April 16)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0%2C1280%2C-3984636%2C00.html
WASHINGTON - President Bush quietly ordered creation of a war plan against Iraq while overseeing a national security team torn by that course, including a vice president determined to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida, says a new book. Bob Woodward, in "Plan of Attack," says Secretary of State Colin Powell believed Vice President Dick Cheney developed — as Woodward puts it — an "unhealthy fixation" on trying to find a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Fatal Flaw In The 911 Coverup, by John Kaminski (April 17)
http://www.rense.com/general51/fatal.htm
Why can no one name the hijackers or prove they flew the planes? Recommended by "Jean-Pierre Caron" galacteus@sympatico.ca> who wrote: "This is one of the best pieces I have read to date on 9/11. The questions asked and the hypotheses stated are worth investigating. To me, this guy deserves to be commended for drawing to our attention the facts that the mainstream media will not even begin considering, let alone address and broadcast!"
Bargaining over Falluja and Najaf (April 16)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3631875.stm
Negotiations continue in Iraq to try to resolve the stand-offs over Najaf and Falluja. The US have built up forces outside both cities, but are holding back their troops to allow a political track. (...) The US and Moqtada Sadr do not trust each other - and the religious establishment based in Najaf trusts neither. In both cases, the mediators stress these are political problems to which there are political solutions. The Americans have been sending mixed messages about which option they will pursue. America's top general, Richard Myers, has said senior US officials are using "multiple channels" in negotiations. But he has also said troops have to be prepared for the possibility of "further military action in Falluja", and spoken of only a "temporary" increase in violence if Moqtada Sadr is forcibly arrested. However, mediators say they have clearly told the Americans what could happen if troops are sent into the Shias' holiest city - such an action could permanently alienate Iraq's Shia majority - and more. "If the Americans invade Najaf, it won't only be Moqtada Sadr's people who fight - all the people will fight," said Walid al Hilli, a leader in the Shia Islamist Dawa Party. "Najaf doesn't belong to Moqtada Sadr. It doesn't even belong to the Shias. It belongs to all Muslims. It is like invading the Vatican," he said. CLIP
Sistani Threatens Shiite Resistance if US Invades Najaf
http://www.juancole.com/2004_04_01_juancole_archive.html#108183083727085448
The Iranian newspaper Baztab is reporting that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has sent a strongly-worded message to the Coalition forces, in which he warned them against attacking the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala after the end of Arba'in.
U.S. violates Fallujah ceasefire (April 14)
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F8388B06-6A1B-43AB-8DF1-529ADBEA24DA.htm
Occupation forces in Iraq have used F16 fighter planes to bomb the Nizal neighbourhood in Fallujah, Aljazeera TV's correspondent has reported. He also said the occupation on Tuesday pushed several tanks through the only open gateway used as an exit for Iraqi families in an apparent violation of the latest ceasefire in Fallujah. (...) The occupation besieged Fallujah, 65km west of Baghdad, nine days ago in an effort to crush the resistance in the city of 300,000. Troops had completely sealed the city, preventing anyone from entering or leaving. Since then, the toll among Iraqis in Fallujah has topped 700 and another 1200 have been injured, according to medical and US military personnel. CLIP
Defiant US says Fallujah dead were rebels
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1190288,00.html
The death toll in Fallujah has sparked widespread international concern and has led to condemnation by the US-appointed Iraqi governing council.
Massacre in Fallujah: Over 600 Dead, 1,000 Injured, 60,000 Refugees
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/12/1423251
The U.S. siege of Fallujah continues and reports are emerging of a massacre of Iraqi civilians at the hands of U.S. troops. We go to Iraq to get a report from Free Speech Radio News' Aaron Glantz who interviews Iraqis fleeing Fallujah.
Arthur Schlesinger: This is Bush's Vietnam - the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place (15 April 2004)
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=511530
There was no popular clamour for war. If we had not gone to war, few Americans would even have noticed This has been a rough time for Americans. Just a year ago, Americans and
Iraqis triumphantly pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. A year later, a spreading anti-American insurgency ripped across Iraq, accompanied by Iraqi mobs mutilating dead Americans and shouting hatred of the occupiers. An American year of miscalculations and misjudgements seems to have led Iraq into a chaos bordering on anarchy. Senator Kennedy's crisp assertion - "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam'' - crystallises emotions in the United States and stirs powerful memories. "Failure is not an option'' had been a favourite Pentagon cliché, but Pat Buchanan, an isolationist of the old school, now declares, "what Fallujah and the Shia attacks tell us is that failure is now an option.''
Bremer 'is powerless to restrain the US military' (15 April 2004)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=511587
Divisions within the US leadership in Baghdad are hampering negotiations to end the stand-off between the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr and the 2,500 American troops who are surrounding him. (...) The US army commanders, going by their statements, appear to have little understanding of the political cost of their actions this month. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said yesterday in Kuwait that "Sadr's recent activities have further marginalised him and he is in a very weak position". Many Shia observers disagree, saying that the American pursuit of Sadr, who was previously seen as a maverick, has gained him the reputation of a martyr among the Shia and he is much more popular than he was before.
Israel threatens tough action in Gaza (15 April 2004)
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/2EDBAFF3-E1B7-45F5-B1DA-244F669BB7B9.htm
Israel has threatened to respond "very seriously" to any Palestinian attacks from Gaza Strip after its planned withdrawal. The warning from a very senior Israeli official on Wednesday came hours after US President George Bush backed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plans to withdraw from the Gaza. "If the Palestinians launch attacks from Gaza after the withdrawal, there will be a very serious response," the official said. "Be very careful. Don't even dare to carry out terror attacks because our response will be very strong," he said. "It is Israel's duty to act against terrorist organisations." "Just like we did with Shaikh Yasin, we will go back and do it again and hurt the terrorist infrastructure," the official added.
A comment received on this above: "The actual reason behind Sharon's decision to evacuate all the Jewish colonies from Gaza is probably to be able afterwards to hit much harder with ever more lethal weapons anywhere in Gaza without imperiling any Israeli lives in Gaza. Willful ethnic cleansing but for a very grim purpose... Could they be taking cues from the horrifying US military tactics in Fallujah?... Or is it the other way around? They may even mount a faked terrorist attack against their own people to justify subsequent revenge in Gaza..."
The end of Zionism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1041960,00.html
Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy.
Americans' use of Israeli tactics backfiring
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E8BE8742-2311-44C7-AC67-C08BF2381196.htm
Some Israeli commentators have highlighted the "striking similarity" between what the Americans are doing in Falluja, Baquba, and Ramadi on the one hand and what the Israeli occupation army has been doing in Rafah, Khan Yunis and Jenin.
Fallujah resistance vows to continue fight
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040412-031514-2639r
"There is no place in Fallujah without a fight," he says. "The Americans have snuck snipers all over Fallujah and everyone can be hit anytime. We only can work at night, but during the day, they kill the civilians. I saw them shoot a family just for trying to run to a car to leave part of the fighting."
UK: Army at breaking point in Iraq
http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=410322004
TONY Blair is to send hundreds more British troops to Iraq in a bid to prevent the south of the country descending into bloodletting and anarchy.
US 'to back Israeli land demands'
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/12/1081621892232.html
The US is to support Israeli demands for parts of the occupied West Bank to be annexed by the Jewish state.
Orthodox Jews to hold Anti Israel Protest Outside White House
http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=60749
To "proclaim and clearly state that Sharon and the State of Israel are illegitimate and they do not represent the Jewish people."
The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/nc-christisons1.html
The link between active promoters of Israeli interests and policymaking circles is stronger by several orders of magnitude in the Bush administration, which is peppered with people who have long records of activism on behalf of Israel in the United States, of policy advocacy in Israel, and of promoting an agenda for Israel.
Cheney Took in $178,437 from Halliburton in 2003
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4816533§ion=news
Vice President Dick Cheney received $178,437 in deferred pay last year from Halliburton, the Texas oil-field services company he once headed that has received billion-dollar government contracts in Iraq.
Nuke arsenal plan failing, report says Livermore Lab ignition facility criticized for wasteful spending on building stadium-size laser (April 14)
http://tinyurl.com/2p8gm
Clear Skies No More for Millions as Pollution Rule Expands http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/041404G.shtml
SAN ANTONIO, April 8 - More than half the nation's population lives in or around areas that violate clean air standards, according to a list to be released on April 15 by the federal government. The list is a long-delayed result of federal standards revised in 1997 and will sweep beyond traditional smog-filled metropolises like Houston, Los Angeles and New York to encompass smaller cities like Little Rock, Ark., and Birmingham, Ala., where the air appears relatively clear. In San Antonio, which has begun taking steps to combat air pollution, the local government broadcasts warnings telling children not to play outside even on some days when the skies are azure blue. Rural communities will be affected along with at least seven national parks, including the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, Acadia in Maine and Yosemite in California. On April 15, the Environmental Protection Agency will release a list of about 500 counties that violate or contribute to violations of ground-level ozone, more than double the number listed under older standards. Ground-level ozone, which is odorless and invisible, is a major component of smog on hot summer days. Prolonged exposure causes the equivalent of sunburn to the lungs.
Defense pushes for a single RFID standard (April 7, 2004)
http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/25517-1.html
Defense Department is on a RFID Offensive - The Department of Defense is aggressively pursing a uniform government wide standard for RFID technology that they would like incorporated into all deliverables shipped on pallets or is cases by manufacturers who also supply a great many products found in local grocery and home improvement stores. Their plan is to following the same technology blueprint for RFID technology as the one announced by Wal-Mart. To coordinate the government wide effort for a uniform RFID policy they are recommending the development of an intergovernmental council.
Big Brother Inc. (March 29, 2004)
http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1101040405-605473,00.html
The biometric technologies now tracking our borders may soon pop up in some cool consumer gadgets.
Watchdogs push for RFID laws
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,62922,00.html
RFID is too powerful a technology and Wal-Mart and its suppliers are too cozy with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for the companies to be trusted with the data gathered from radio tags on consumer goods, say civil rights lawyers and a privacy law expert. But the companies, led by Procter & Gamble, are opposing RFID legislation, and want consumers to allow them to keep RFID tags active after checkout, and to match shoppers' personal information with particular items.
Transforming rays into weapons (April 8, 2004)
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=business&story_id=040804d1_rtnweapons
Raytheon develops nonlethal directed-energy gun - Stopping an adversary in his boots with a nonlethal ray gun is no longer just a sci-fi pipe dream, according to a local defense contract official. Nonlethal directed-energy scientists have tested a weapon that does just that, only on a slightly larger scale than a handgun, said Wade W. Smith, deputy of Raytheon Missile Systems' Directed Energy Weapons division. (...) The ADT weapon shoots a narrow beam of concentrated electromagnetic energy. Traveling at the speed of light, the energy penetrates less than 1/64 of an inch into the skin quickly heating up the skin's surface, according to the Department of Defense. The pain is nearly identical to that experienced when briefly touching a hot light bulb, but it leaves no burn mark or permanent damage. "The ADT weapon literally gets under your skin and causes high, nonlethal pain," Smith said. (...) Although field testing will begin in May, the technology is in its "embryonic stage" in terms of controlling the weapon's energy beam, Smith said. Nonlethal technologies can be used for protection of defense resources, peacekeeping, humanitarian missions or homeland defense. A Vehicle-Mounted Active-Denial System using a Humvee now exists, and versions of the weapon installed on military fighter aircraft and ships are 10 years down the road, Smith said. CLIP
Amazon Disappearing At Alarming Rate: WWF Calls For Urgent Action To Slow Loss
http://www.worldwildlife.org/news/headline.cfm?newsid=645
1.
From: "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net>
Subject: Heads Up... from Michael Moore
Date: 15 Apr 2004
Heads Up
April 14, 2004
Friends,
I have never seen a head so far up a Presidential ass (pardon my Falluja) than the one I saw last night at the "news conference" given by George W. Bush. He's still talking about finding "weapons of mass destruction" -- this time on Saddam's "turkey farm." Turkey indeed. Clearly the White House believes there are enough idiots in the 17 swing states who will buy this. I think they are in for a rude awakening.
I've been holed up for weeks in the editing room finishing my film ("Fahrenheit 911"). That's why you haven't heard from me lately. But after last night's Lyndon Johnson impersonation from the East Room -- essentially promising to send even more troops into the Iraq sinkhole -- I had to write you all a note.
First, can we stop the Orwellian language and start using the proper names for things? Those are not „contractors‰ in Iraq. They are not there to fix a roof or to pour concrete in a driveway. They are MERCENARIES and SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE. They are there for the money, and the money is very good if you live long enough to spend it.
Halliburton is not a "company" doing business in Iraq. It is a WAR PROFITEER, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars they would have been arrested -- or worse.
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush? You closed down a friggin' weekly newspaper, you great giver of freedom and democracy! Then all hell broke loose. The paper only had 10,000 readers! Why are you smirking?
One year after we wiped the face of the Saddam statue with our American flag before yanking him down, it is now too dangerous for a single media person to go to that square in Baghdad and file a report on the wonderful one-year anniversary celebration. Of course, there is no celebration, and those brave blow-dried "embeds" can't even leave the safety of the fort in downtown Baghdad. They never actually SEE what is taking place across Iraq (most of the pictures we see on TV are shot by Arab media and some Europeans). When you watch a report "from Iraq" what you are getting is the press release handed out by the U.S. occupation force and repeated to you as "news."
I currently have two cameramen/reporters doing work for me in Iraq for my movie (unbeknownst to the Army). They are talking to soldiers and gathering the true sentiment about what is really going on. They Fed Ex the footage back to me each week. That's right, Fed Ex. Who said we haven't brought freedom to Iraq! The funniest story my guys tell me is how when they fly into Baghdad, they don't have to show a passport or go through immigration. Why not? Because they have not traveled from a foreign country -- they're coming from America TO America, a place that is ours, a new American territory called Iraq.
There is a lot of talk amongst Bush's opponents that we should turn this war over to the United Nations. Why should the other countries of this world, countries who tried to talk us out of this folly, now have to clean up our mess? I oppose the U.N. or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle. I'm sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe -- just maybe -- God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.
Until then, enjoy the "pacification" of Falluja, the "containment" of Sadr City, and the next Tet Offensive ˆ oops, I mean, "terrorist attack by a small group of Baathist loyalists" (Hahaha! I love writing those words, Baathist loyalists, it makes me sound so Peter Jennings!) -- followed by a "news conference" where we will be told that we must "stay the course" because we are "winning the hearts and minds of the people."
I'll write again soon. Don't despair. Remember, the American people are not that stupid. Sure, we can be frightened into a war, but we always come around sooner or later -- and the one way this is NOT like Vietnam is that it hasn't taken the public four long years to figure out they were lied to.
Now if Bush would just quit speaking in public and giving me more free material for my movie, I can get back to work and get it done. I've got four weeks left 'til completion.
Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
http://www.michaelmoore.com
---
See also:
(NOTE: ALL the links below come from Klaus Rudolph's Omega - Newsletter, April 15 - To receive it, ask it to him at Star.Mail@t-online.de> or go through his site at http://www.buergerwelle.de/english_start.html - He specializes in revealing the threat posed by mobile phones, mobile radiocommunictions and electrosmog.)
New Reports on U.S. Planting WMDs in Iraq
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0413-02.htm
If you were wondering why Bush was still harping about finding WMD at his news conference this may explain it.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Response to Bush press conference
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/195134/
Condi Rice Wouldn't Admit Mistakes
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/April2004/Jensen0413.htm
Laziness in the Face of Mortal Danger
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/April2004/Eland0413.htm
Do-it-yourself government
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/pauljacob/pj20040411.shtml
Democracy explodes over Iraq
http://fredoneverything.net/IraqExplosion.shtml
What brought on the French Revolution?
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1489
Hired guns
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098571/
Big think
http://tinyurl.com/26vao
Bush war lords to critics
http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk04102004.html
Civil offense
http://www.reason.com/links/links041204.shtml
Unasked questions
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10232
The Iraqi resistance: a new phase
http://www.counterpunch.org/ali04102004.html
Footsoldier: The Achilles heel in America's quest for empire
http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/herman/herman12.html
A failure of the welfare state
http://tinyurl.com/36fyg
Not ready for prime time
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/14/bush/
30,000 American dead? No problem!
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/unz1.html
Promises, promises...
http://www.libertyforall.net/2004/april25/Promises.html
Bush administration slow to issue official apology
http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?news_id=32240
Shiite uprising taking political toll on U.S. Iraq policies
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/102/world/U_S_drive_to_deal_with_insurge:.shtml
While our troops remain on Iraq's streets there is no hope
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1190110,00.html
U.S. government debt jumping by trillions
http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/business/8403594.htm
Nearly Half of Every Tax Dollar Goes to Military, National Debt
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0409-03.htm
Soldier's wife says husband died for "lost" cause
http://cbs4boston.com/massachusetts/MA--SoldierKilled-gn/resources_news_html
Cheney Took in $178,437 from Halliburton in 2003
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4816533§ion=news
Former Congressmen Assess U.S. Foreign Policy
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/April_2004/0404020.html
Australian defence adviser 'sacked for refusing to sex up WMD reports'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,12070,1190665,00.html
Keystone Kounter-Terror
http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6&pid=1372
Senior officials received different memo than Bush
http://www.heraldnews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=11301291&BRD=1710&PAG=461&dept_id=99784&rfi=6
One, Two, Many Messes
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/April2004/Lobe0412.htm
Intifada, Iraqi Style
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/April2004/Klein0412.htm
Defiant US Says Falluja Dead Were Rebels; Hospital Says Vast Majority Were Women, Children and the Elderly
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0412-01.htm
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR: IRAQ AND VIETNAM
http://www.fpif.org/progresp/volume8/v8n11.html
Ashcroft's Record of Lying to Congress About 9/11
http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df04132004.html
2.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F04%2F11%2Fwtact11.xml
U.S. Tactics Condemned by British Officers
By Sean Rayment
Sunday 11 April 2004
Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.
The officer, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for "sub-humans".
Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.
"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
The phrase untermenschen - literally "under-people" - was brought to prominence by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, published in 1925. He used the term to describe those he regarded as racially inferior: Jews, Slaves and gipsies.
Although no formal complaints have as yet been made to their American counterparts, the officer said the British Government was aware of its commanders' "concerns and fears".
The officer explained that, under British military rules of war, British troops would never be given clearance to carry out attacks similar to those being conducted by the US military, in which helicopter gunships have been used to fire on targets in urban areas.
British rules of engagement only allow troops to open fire when attacked, using the minimum force necessary and only at identified targets.
The American approach was markedly different: "When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.
"They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later. They are very concerned about taking casualties and have even trained their guns on British troops, which has led to some confrontations between soldiers.
"The British response in Iraq has been much softer. During and after the war the British set about trying to win the confidence of the local population. There have been problems, it hasn't been easy but on the whole it was succeeding."
The officer believed that America had now lost the military initiative in Iraq, and it could only be regained with carefully planned, precision attacks against the "terrorists".
"The US will have to abandon the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach - it has failed," he said. "They need to stop viewing every Iraqi, every Arab as the enemy and attempt to win the hearts and minds of the people.
"Our objective is to create a stable, democratic and safe Iraq. That's achievable but not in the short term. It is going to take up to 10 years."
3.
Forwarded by From: "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net>
From: http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/wheeler/wheeler1.html
Some People Push Back
by Thomas Wheeler
thomasdwheeler@comcast.net
April 15, 2004
"Your sons have killed our fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. Your sons have stolen, pillaged, raped, polluted the earth and the water, and burnt the fields. In fact, dear sisters, your sons are the real barbarians, the murderers, and criminals. Therefore, please don't blame us for hating them." - Letter from an Iraqi Mother
In April 2003, the United States was celebrating a "cakewalk" and on May 1, 2003, George Bush declared "the end of major combat operations" in front of a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished". In April 2004, "cakewalk" has been replaced with "quagmire" and "Mission Accomplished" has been taken over by a "Nightmare Scenario."
How bad have things gotten since the U.S. launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom" last year? Former weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared Iraq was better under Saddam Hussein. An Iraqi battalion refused to go to Fallujah to support U.S. Marines and significant portions of the Iraqi security forces stopped carrying out their duties. Respect for U.S. troops and the technological sophistication of the U.S. military machine has evaporated. Decades-old weaponry from the rag-tag Iraqi resistance are taking down their helicopters, hitting their convoys and battering their supply lines. Even children are celebrating and dancing on burned out American vehicles shouting "George Bush is Saddam Hussein. George Bush is terrorist!"
There is growing concern as the U.S. military struggles to secure their supply lines. Commenting on the deteriorating conditions, one defense contractor said the resistance fighters "own the roads." This situation has led to Halliburton suspending some convoy deliveries to the military in Iraq. Halliburton's support services are considered vital to the U.S. military and continued disruptions could result in shortfalls of food, water and fuel supplies. A rash of kidnappings has also increased the risks to contractors and foreigners, with some choosing to pull out of Iraq altogether. One Russian company is pulling out its entire staff of 370 people.
At least 83 U.S. troops have already been killed in just the first 12 days of April with more than 560 wounded. The 83 dead already makes this April the worst month ever and the number of wounded exceeds the worst month by more than 220 - and we still have two and a half weeks to go.
Last week's indiscriminate slaughter and brutal repression by the U.S. military against the popular resistance forces in Fallujah has meant that Iraqis are dying in much larger numbers. Deaths in the past week range from a conservative estimate of nearly 900 to more than 1,300 killed with thousands wounded. Independent correspondent Dahr Jamail reports that the Americans are slaughtering civilians in Falluja with numerous women and children shot by American snipers and ambulances being shot at by the Americans.
The Arab press is quite aware these U.S. military operations look similar to Israel's tactics in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli military has been teaching those tactics to the U.S. military. The same Israeli military that even encouraged its own army to "analyze and internalize the lessons of how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto." Israel's brutal tactics of repression include assassinations, mass detentions, house demolitions, indiscriminate torture, targeting ambulances, the denial of food, water, and electricity to the civilian population, brutal assaults on urban neighborhoods, and targeting journalists. This pretty much describes what the Americans are doing in Iraq. Professor Norman Finkelstein once wrote: "If Israelis don't want to stand accused of being Nazis they should simply stop acting like Nazis." The same obviously applies to the United States.
Another factor to consider is the racist contempt of the Iraqis by U.S. troops which is frighteningly common and pervasive. A British officer is quoted in The Telegraph as saying part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as "untermenschen" - the Nazi expression for "sub-humans". These American attitudes towards the Iraqi people were amply demonstrated in a CNN story called "Fit to Kill" where Marines celebrate the killing of a wounded Iraqi crawling on the ground. When interviewed about the execution of the Iraqi, one Marine replied "it was a good feeling" and proudly proclaimed "hell, yeah, that was awesome. Let's do it again!"
The first two weeks of April have certainly been pretty violent. What is frightening is it may get a lot worse. The fragile "ceasefire" supposedly in effect near Falluja may only be the relative calm before the real shitstorm. Some of the Marines who surround the city are anticipating a brutal and bloody offensive to take the city. They talk quite openly and eagerly of "leveling" the city of 200,000. Lance Cpl. Ryan Christiansen, told a Newsday reporter: "I really don't care; they're all gonna die."
A recent comment from the American commander, General John Abizaid, also indicates that the U.S. military may engage in a violent bloodbath to crush the Iraqi uprising. "We're going to do whatever it takes to ensure that we're successful out here," he said.
That includes a request for an additional 10,000 troops as U.S.-trained Iraqi policemen continue to abandon the Americans, join the insurgents, or simply refuse to fight. Pentagon officials have also announced that nearly 20,000 American troops that were scheduled to return home will instead remain in Iraq for as long as three additional months.
Besides the U.S. military reinforcements around Falluja, a 2,500-strong force with massive amounts of firepower is being massed on the outskirts of Najaf where cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is currently located. Ayatollah Ali Sistani has warned them against attacking the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. Many feel an attack on Najaf could result in a massive Shiite rebellion throughout the country. One expert on Middle East matters, Profess or Juan Cole, wrote: "If the Shiites actively turn against the U.S., the whole military and security situation could become untenable." This has apparently not deterred U.S. war criminals like General Mark Kimmitt regarding Najaf where Muqtada al-Sadr is currently residing. Said Kimmitt: "We will hunt him down and destroy him."
The U.S. media have characterized the killing of four heavily-armed Blackwater mercenaries and the hanging of two of their bodies from a bridge as a "massacre" and characterized the behavior as "despicable" "savage" and "barbaric." White House spokesman Scott McClellan called them "horrific attacks" and "cowardly, hateful acts." U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer called those who engaged in this action as "ghouls and cowards." The New York Post called them "cold-blooded, ruthless barbarians." Interesting rhetoric when one recalls Vietnam where U.S. troops dragged bodies behind their vehicles and proudly displayed the severed body parts on their belts of the Vietnamese they butchered and mutilated.
The U.S. press and government officials take a decidedly different tone when it comes to the far more deadly, barbaric behavior of the U.S. military. U.S. troops have murdered a number of Iraqis by indiscriminately firing into crowds of unarmed protesters, dropping large bombs in urban neighborhoods, engaging in strafing runs by Apache helicopter gunships, and firing into vehicles filled with Iraqi men, women and children at military checkpoints. Descriptions in the mainstream U.S. media characterizing such brutality as "horrific attacks" or "cowardly, hateful acts" have been missing in action. Nor were these unprovoked massacres characterized as "savage" or "barbaric". Journalist John Pilger notes that as many as 55,000 Iraqis have been killed by the latest example of Western colonial terrorism. One word often used to describe these killings? "Justified."
General Mark Kimmitt declared, "Individuals who create violence, who incite violence. will be hunted down and captured or killed." Considering the vast majority of individuals creating violence and engaging in brutal war crimes are U.S. military personnel and U.S. mercenaries, it should not surprise Kimmitt that the resistance fighters appear to have adopted his advice and applied it to their situation.
Let's not forget that the U.S. occupation forces have kidnapped and detained thousands of Iraqis. There is significant evidence of torture. U.S. forces also engaged in kidnapping and detaining relatives of suspected former officials and insurgents who themselves were not suspected of any wrongdoing. U.S. occupation forces had some of their homes demolished, an action Human Rights Watch called "collective punishment" and a violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Human Rights Watch also stated the detaining of relatives should be more accurately be called hostage-taking, which is a war crime.
Over the years, the Iraqis have endured the deliberate targeting and systematic destruction of water treatment facilities and sewage plants in order to create "favorable conditions for disease outbreaks, particularly in major urban areas" (according to a 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document). This was followed by a deliberate U.S. policy of blocking humanitarian supplies to deny necessary repairs, medicines and medical equipment resulting in 1 to 1.5 million deaths, many of them children - a U.S.-enforced embargo declared "genocidal" by Denis Halliday, former Deputy Under Secretary of the UN. The deaths of 500,000 children as a result of the sanctions and blockade against medical supplies was deemed "worth it" by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
The United States is now engaged in a savage and brutal occupation against a vastly outgunned enemy with the civilian population as their primary target. As the anger, resentment, and resistance to the occupation has grown, the level of barbarism which is taking shape increasingly resembles those carried out by Nazi Germany against its enemies. The U.S. has committed and will likely continue to engage in terrorist atrocities and war crimes with ever greater fervor to suppress this legitimate and growing resistance.
But what also must be understood is when you push people around and brutalize them, some of these people will push back. And some of them will push back as hard as they can. The Iraqis have every right to armed resistance and to defend themselves against this brutal and vicious occupation by whatever means they see fit. Bush challenged them to "bring it on." And that is exactly what they are doing.
4.
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1190300,00.html
An Iraqi Intifada
Naomi Klein in Baghdad
12 April 2004
Now the war is being fought in the open, by people defending their homes.
April 9, 2003 was the day Baghdad fell to US forces. One year later, it is rising up against them.
Donald Rumsfeld claims that the resistance is just a few "thugs, gangs and terrorists". This is dangerous wishful thinking. The war against the occupation is now being fought out in the open, by regular people defending their homes and neighbourhoods - an Iraqi intifada.
"They stole our playground," an eight-year-old boy in Sadr City told me this week, pointing at six tanks parked in a soccer field, next to a rusty jungle gym. The field is a precious bit of green in an area of Baghdad that is otherwise a swamp of raw sewage and uncollected rubbish.
Sadr City has seen little of Iraq's multibillion-dollar "reconstruction", which is partly why Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army have so much support here. Before the US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, provoked Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Mahdi army was not fighting coalition forces, it was doing their job for them.
After all, in the year it has controlled Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority still hasn't managed to get the traffic lights working or to provide the most basic security for civilians. So in Sadr City, Sadr's so-called "outlaw militia" can be seen engaged in such subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding factories from looters. In a way, the Mahdi army is as much Bremer's creation as it Sadr's: it was Bremer who created Iraq's security vacuum - Sadr simply filled it.
But as the June 30 "hand-over" to Iraqi control approaches, Bremer now sees Sadr and the Mahdi as a threat that must be taken out - along with the communities that have grown to depend on them. Which is why stolen playgrounds were only the start of what I saw in Sadr City this week.
In al-Thawra hospital, I met Raad Daier, a 36-year-old ambulance driver with a bullet in his lower abdomen, one of 12 shots fired at his ambulance from a US Humvee. According to hospital officials, at the time of the attack, he was carrying six people injured by US forces, including a pregnant woman who had been shot in the stomach and lost her child.
I saw charred cars that dozens of eye-witnesses said had been hit by US missiles, and local hospitals confirmed that their drivers had been burned alive. I also visited Block 37 of Sadr City's Chuadir district, a row of houses where every door was riddled with holes. Residents said US tanks rolled down their street firing into their homes. Five people were killed, including Murtada Muhammad, aged four.
And I saw something that I feared more than any of this: a copy of the Koran with a bullet hole through it. It was lying in the ruins of what was Sadr's headquarters in Sadr City. On April 8, according to witnesses, two US tanks broke down the walls of the centre while two guided missiles pierced its roof, leaving giant craters in the floor and missile debris behind.
The worst damage, however, was done by hand. The clerics at the Sadr office say that US soldiers entered the building and crudely shredded photographs of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shia cleric in Iraq. When I arrived at the destroyed centre, the floor was covered in torn religious texts, including several copies of the Koran that been ripped and shot through with bullets. And it did not escape the notice of the Shias here that hours earlier, US soldiers had bombed a Sunni mosque in Falluja.
For months the White House has been making ominous predictions of a civil war breaking out between the majority Shias, who believe it's their turn to rule Iraq, and the minority Sunnis, who want to hold on to the privileges they amassed under Saddam Hussein's regime. But this week the opposite appears to have taken place. Both Sunni and Shia have seen their neighbourhoods attacked and their religious sites desecrated. Up against a shared enemy, they are beginning to bury ancient rivalries and join forces against the occupation. Instead of a civil war, they are on the verge of building a common front.
You could see it at the mosques in Sadr City on Thursday: thousands of Shias lined up to donate blood, destined for Sunnis hurt in the attacks in Falluja. "We should thank Paul Bremer," Salih Ali told me. "He has finally united Iraq. Against him."
5.
From: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/13/chalabi/index_np.html
When Puppets Pull the Strings
By Martin Sieff
13 April 2004
Ahmed Chalabi, the neocons' choice to run Iraq, appears to have been responsible for the disastrous decision to move against Muqtada al-Sadr.
Why did they do it? It seemed a safe bet to the civilian echelon policymakers at the Department of Defense when they approved Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer's fateful decision to close down the newspaper of Muqtada al-Sadr and to arrest an aide to the young firebrand Shiite cleric. Even after Shiite Iraq had erupted into fury over the moves on Saturday, April 3, top-level Pentagon policymakers were privately still convinced it was all a storm in a teacup.
A small event on Sunday, April 4, the very day after the move against al-Sadr prompted the revolt, provides the missing piece to the puzzle. For that was when the CPA announced the name of Iraq's putative new defense minister for the post-June 30 government. His name is Ali Allawi and he is a loyal, close associate of Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. More, he is Chalabi's nephew.
Chalabi, longtime exile leader, has never had a power base within Iraq. He is a smooth operator, convicted of embezzling millions from the Petra Bank of Jordan -- sentenced in absentia to 22 years of hard labor -- but championed by the neoconservatives of Washington. They had lined up Chalabi to be their man in Baghdad years before the conquest of Iraq. Although he is a Shiia, the 60-year-old Chalabi had not lived there since age 12, and when he returned he surrounded himself with a U.S.-paid personal militia but had no political following. Without his U.S. sponsors, he would not last five minutes as a force. He is widely suspected of profiting enormously from U.S. contracts in the country. After the war, Chalabi proudly boasted of providing misleading intelligence to the U.S. government that was indispensable in spurring the invasion. He remains on the Pentagon's payroll -- $340,000 a month -- not counting the $40 million that he's received at the insistence of the Republican-dominated Congress over the past decade. He is a focal point of mistrust on all sides within Iraq.
Just as Bremer will not make the slightest move without the approval of his Pentagon bosses, the Defense Department policymakers continue to rely on Chalabi alone for their political assessments on Iraq. In private conversation, as in public, they remain amazingly enthusiastic about Chalabi's supposed political skills, and even genius, and proclaim repeatedly that he is the only man with the brilliance to hold Iraq together and make it work. Give Chalabi a free hand after June 30 and give him all the U.S. firepower he wants to crush his foes -- this is their master plan; there is no other.
The CPA actually had some "hard" data to support this wildly inaccurate interpretation. For U.S. military intelligence assessments in Iraq had concluded that al-Sadr was a fading force. The crowds attending his sermons were smaller. The number of armed supporters he could count on to exert his will was decreasing. The tone of his public pronouncements was becoming shriller and more desperate as the June 30 hand-over date to Iraqi leaders approved by the U.S. authorities came closer.
This information was not false or wishful thinking. It appears to have been entirely accurate. The problem was that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, without whose say-so Bremer does not even dare to breathe, misinterpreted it. By moving against al-Sadr when they did not have to, they revived the firebrand's credibility throughout Iraq's 65 percent majority Shiite community. And they also opened the door for something neoconservative pundits had unanimously agreed was impossible: They made common ground between Sadr's Shiite supporters and the Sunni Islamist guerrillas who have been fighting the United States implacably in their own heartland of central Iraq.
There is no way that the move against al-Sadr was undertaken without Chalabi's prior knowledge and explicit approval. Instead, given the extraordinary degree to which the Pentagon policymakers and Vice President Dick Cheney continue to privately disparage the far more accurate, sober and reliable professional assessments of the U.S. Army's own tactical military intelligence in Iraq, it appears clear that, yet again, Chalabi was the tail that wagged the dog. He could have been expected to urge the move on al-Sadr in the first place.
The benefit to him is obvious. Chalabi believes -- as do his still-worshipful Pentagon backers -- that he has the blessing of supposedly moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the mainstream chief religious authority of the Iraqi Shiites, to take power on July 1 with the force of 110,000 U.S. soldiers and their automatic weapons behind him.
However, just as the neocons lead President Bush by the nose, and Chalabi leads them by the nose, Sistani and the Iranians have been leading him by the nose.
Sistani's policy toward the CPA and Chalabi has been no different from the way he survived as an ayatollah all those years under Saddam Hussein, which was no mean feat. Sistani is playing a cautious waiting game and avoiding the ire of those who currently are top dog in Baghdad. He will drop Chalabi -- and the United States -- at the drop of a hat as soon it becomes clear that they cannot run or tame Iraq.
Chalabi and the neocon geniuses in the Pentagon are all willfully blind to the wafer-thin nature of the "support" they enjoy from Sistani. From their perspective, Muqtada al-Sadr was the only fly left in the ointment. Much better, from Chalabi's point of view, to have the United States to do the dirty work and get al-Sadr out of the way so that he could then emerge as Iraq's unifying leader with his hands clean on July 1 rather than risk the opprobrium of eliminating al-Sadr himself.
Of course, it has not worked out that way. Instead, the Shiite rising has spread like wildfire across all southern and central Iraq. The Sunni insurgents have rallied to al-Sadr's cause as well. The worst thing that could possibly happen now is that al-Sadr, whom Bremer rapidly proclaimed an outlaw, may be killed by U.S. forces, thereby activating the most passionate and extreme martyrdom emotions of young Shiites across Iraq. And as soon as the rising began, the much-touted Iraqi police and security forces that Bremer had claimed were progressing so impressively turned tail and ran from every confrontation.
The myth of Iraqization of this war is now dead. The Pentagon masterminds remain determined to push Chalabi through as prime minister and absolute ruler of Iraq de facto on July 1. GOP heavyweights have even been assured around Washington that hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks from U.S. companies to Chalabi to do business in Iraq will be used for a good
cause: to spread democracy in -- read, destabilize -- neighboring Saudi Arabia and Iran.
But the al-Sadr revolt means Chalabi will now only be able to rule on the shoulders of at least 110,000 U.S. soldiers. It may take twice as many. That means that Iraq will not settle down nicely in time for the Republican National Convention in New York. Far from dramatically reducing the level of U.S casualties by Iraqizing security, the hand-over will almost certainly dramatically boost the scale and rate of U.S. fatalities and casualties. U.S. forces will not be able to remain in the passive-reactive mode of hunkering down in their bivouacs that they have followed in recent months in central Iraq to reduce casualties. They will likely be forced to take the offensive in cities across Iraq on a far wider front against infinitely more enemies than they had faced before April 2.
This latest catastrophic bungle by Bremer and his bosses to clear the way for Chalabi is the biggest yet. You think this is bad? To quote Al Jolson, "You ain't seen nothin' yet."
6.
From: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0414/p01s03-woiq.html
Refugees tell of rising anger in Fallujah
April 14, 2004
By Christina Asquith | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BAGHDAD - With a US Apache helicopter hovering above, Kadher Fudella took her children and began to run. She did not stop until she reached the highway, along with scores of other refugees, flagging down cars headed to Baghdad.
"My children tried to run away and the helicopters chased them," says Ms. Fudella, breaking into tears. "Families were running through the streets.... Windows were broken, and many, many people were dead."
Fudella is one of tens of thousands of refugees to have fled the besieged city of Fallujah, where a US assault left 600 dead last week. The victims include hundreds of women and children, according to hospital and clinic records in Fallujah, before a cease-fire was carved out over the weekend. The violence that erupted last week in Iraq has been subdued in recent days. As of late Tuesday, a fragile four-day cease-fire was still holding in Fallujah, and emergency supplies to help the wounded were streaming through. On another front, after negotiations with Iraqi leaders, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's army moved out of police stations and government buildings in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, as well as Karbala and Kufa. But the relative calm, many say, is tenuous. Sadr's army rebuffed US demands that it disband, and according to news wire reports, a 2,500-strong US force moved to the outskirts of Najaf Tuesday.
Occupation troops were still circling Fallujah, where a helicopter was shot down Tuesday. And the reported kidnappings of some 40 foreigners during the week, over a dozen of whom have since been released, has raised the stakes for coalition forces.
Back in Baghdad, Fallujah's refugees are still reeling from the violence they witnessed last week. As many as 60,000 - one fifth of the city - may have poured into Baghdad since Friday, taking shelter in private homes and mosques. US forces say civilians have been caught in the crossfire, but that their primary mission was to "take out insurgents."
Fudella told her story from a crowded, dank, bomb shelter in Baghdad, alongside some 60 other Fallujan women and children. With tattooed hands and black veils wrapped around their faces, the women shouted out accusations of reckless killings by the US forces the say they witnessed: a neighbor's house bombed, killing all 19 people inside; a 5-year-old gunned down by a sniper on a minaret; an old man mowed down by helicopter fire.
The women say they hid with their children in their homes from Wednesday until fleeing over the weekend, while many of the men stayed behind. "I have not seen my husband since Friday," says Turka Hashim, a crying baby in her arms. Ms. Hashim says she believes he stayed in Fallujah to fight. In fact, many of the men in the shelter displayed anger. Take Hamid Ali. He says he only came to the Sunni Islamic Party headquarters in Baghdad to find a safe place to relocate his family.
He arrived late Sunday evening, having fled by foot and later by car. "I only came here to drop off my family. I will be going back to Fallujah to help the resistance as soon as possible." Ali was surrounded by several Fallujan men in their 20s and 30s who nodded in agreement.
Fallujah, a Sunni stronghold, has been a hotbed of anti-American resistance since last April. US forces began their attack on the city on April 4 this year, vowing to "hunt down" those responsible for the murder and mutilation of four US security contractors in late March. With most highways into the city either blocked by US military, or deemed too dangerous to travel, refugees offer one of the few first-hand accounts of the turmoil. Exact facts and figures have yet to be confirmed. Dr. Najeeb al-Ani, a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, entered the city on Saturday with a US escort.
"People were not allowed in the hospitals because the roads are closed. I saw 50 wounded people gathered in mosques on the floor. The doctors are afraid of the Americans - that they will shoot them even in the hospitals." On Sunday morning in Baghdad, Dr. Ani prepared a relief convoy into Fallujah. Stacks of fresh water were piled up outside a Baghdad mosque. Neighborhood residents cooked bread and donated other food and supplies. . Across Baghdad, residents have come out to condemn the US assault. Store owners have closed down their shops, and students are protesting at universities.
"We are calling for negotiations and a legal route, not fighting," says Dr. Taqy Mosuwy, vice president of Al Mustansiriyah University. "Because of this, the problem is no longer between the Americans and Moqtada al-Sadr's army. Now, the problem is between America and Iraq."
Some refugees have taken shelter in private homes of Sunni Islamists. Adnan Abid, a taxi driver, described how he escaped in his father's orange and white Brazilian taxi with his family. They took side roads out of the city and did not stop until they reached Baghdad.
"I saw nine people on the roof, and the helicopter shot them all dead," he says. "On the way to Baghdad I saw bodies in the car. I couldn't help them because the Americans were shooting everyone."
Coalition forces have disputed claims that attacks have killed or wounded many civilians, though they say the number is impossible to verify. They have reported that most of the victims were probably participating in the insurgency.
But, like many other refugees from Fallujah, this family is critical. "We have no hope. Half of our family is in Fallujah, and we don't know anything about them," says Mr. Abid's wife, Hakima. "There's darkness everywhere." The family fell silent, until their son Mohammed Adnan added his take, that the US has only magnified the problems. "Before it was a small, specific group that fought the USA," he says. "Now it is every family. They all want revenge."
7.
Forwarded by "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net>
From: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?sf=2813&art_id=vn20040413132117588C325435&click_id=2813&set_id=1
DEATHS OF SCORES OF MERCENARIES NOT REPORTED
The Star (April 13 2004)
By Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad - At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq.
Lieutenant-General Mark Kimmitt admitted on Tuesday that "about 70" American and other Western troops had died during the Iraqi insurgency since April 1 but he made no mention of the mercenaries, apparently fearful that the full total of Western dead would have serious political fallout.
He did not give a figure for Iraqi dead, which, across the country may be as high as 900.
Full total of Western dead would have serious political fallout
At least 18 000 mercenaries, many of them tasked to protect US troops and personnel, are now believed to be in Iraq, some of them earning $1000 a day. But their companies rarely acknowledge their losses unless - like the four American murdered and mutilated in Fallujah three weeks ago - their deaths are already public knowledge.
The presence of such large numbers of mercenaries, first publicised in The Independent two weeks ago, was bound to lead to further casualties.
But although many of the heavily armed Western security men are working for the US Department of Defence - and most of them are former Special Forces soldiers - they are not listed as serving military personnel. Their losses can therefore be hidden from public view.
The US authorities in Iraq, however, are aware that more Western mercenaries lost their lives in the past week than occupation soldiers over the past 14 days.
The coalition has sought to rely on foreign contract workers to reduce the number of soldiers it uses as drivers, guards and in other jobs normally carried out by uniformed soldiers.
Often the foreign contract workers are highly paid former soldiers who are armed with automatic weapons, leading to Iraqis viewing all foreign workers as possible mercenaries or spies.
8.
THIS IS WHAT NO WESTERN MEDIA WILL EVER DARE LET ANYONE KNOW. AN AMAZINGLY COURAGEOUS AMERICAN WOMAN TELLS US ABOUT THE HORRORS AND THE AMERICAN MASSACRE SHE SAW FIRST-HAND IN FALLUJAH.
Recommended by "Nita Noor" sraosha@indo.net.id>
From: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1843.jsp
Inside the fire
Jo Wilding
13 - 4 - 2004
A brave and harrowing report from inside the besieged city of Fallujah where ordinary people are trapped in the cross-fire.
11 April, Fallujah
Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Fallujah. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that is not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people with few possessions heading the other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people still inside Fallujah.
For the Pentagon’s reply to this article please click here
The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I am on the bus is that a journalist I know turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Fallujah. He had been bringing out children with their limbs blown off. The US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.
He said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it getting there with foreigners, westerners, to get through the American checkpoints. The rest of the way was secured with the armed groups who control the roads we would travel on. We would take in the medical supplies, see what else we could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave.
I’ll spare you the whole decision making process, the questions we all asked ourselves and each other, and you can spare me the accusations of madness, but what it came down to was this: if I don’t do it, who will? Either way, we arrived in one piece.
We pile the stuff in the corridor and the boxes are torn open straightaway; the blankets most welcomed. It is not a hospital at all but a clinic, a private doctor’s surgery treating people free since air strikes destroyed the town’s main hospital. Another has been improvised in a car garage. There is no anaesthetic. The blood bags are in a drinks fridge and the doctors warm them up under the hot tap in an unhygienic toilet.
Screaming women come in, praying, slapping their chests and faces. Ummi, mother, one cries. I hold her until Maki, a consultant and acting director of the clinic, brings me to the bed where a child of about ten is lying with a bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper, they said, hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Fallujah.
The lights go out, the fan stops and in the sudden quiet someone holds up the flame of a cigarette lighter for the doctor to carry on operating by. The electricity to the town has been cut off for days and when the generator runs out of petrol they just have to manage till it comes back on. Dave quickly donates his torch. The children are not going to live.
“Come,” says Maki and ushers me alone into a room where an old woman has just had an abdominal bullet wound stitched up. Another in her leg is being dressed, the bed under her foot soaked with blood, a white flag still clutched in her hand and the same story: “I was leaving my home to go to Baghdad when I was hit by a US sniper.” Some of the town is held by US marines, other parts by the local fighters. These people’s homes are in the US controlled area and they are adamant that the shooters were US marines.
Snipers are causing not just carnage but also the paralysis of the ambulance and evacuation services. The biggest hospital after the main one was bombed is in US territory and cut off from the clinic by snipers. The ambulance has been repaired four times after bullet damage. Bodies are lying in the streets because no one can go to collect them without being shot.
Some said we were mad to come to Iraq; quite a few said we were completely insane to come to Fallujah, and now there are people telling me that getting in the back of the pick-up to go past the snipers and get sick and injured people is the craziest thing they have ever seen. I know, though, that if we don’t, no one will.
He is holding a white flag with a red crescent on; I don’t know his name. The men we pass wave us on when the driver explains where we are going. The silence is ferocious in the no man’s land between the pick-up at the edge of the Mujahedin territory, which has just gone from our sight around the last corner and the marines’ line beyond the next wall; no birds, no music, no indication that anyone is still living – until a gate opens opposite and a woman comes out and points.
We edge along to the hole in the wall where we can see the car, spent mortar shells around it. The feet are visible, crossed, in the gutter. I think he is dead already. The snipers are visible too, two of them on the corner of the building. As yet I think they can’t see us so we need to let them know we are there.
“Hello,” I bellow at the top of my voice. “Can you hear me?” They must. They are about 30 metres from us, maybe less, and it’s so still you could hear the flies buzzing at fifty paces. I repeat myself a few times, still without reply, so decide to explain myself a bit more.
“We are a medical team. We want to remove this wounded man. Is it OK for us to come out and get him? Can you give us a signal that it’s OK?”
I’m sure they can hear me but they are still not responding. Maybe they didn’t understand it all, so I say the same again. Dave yells too in his US accent. I yell again. Finally I think I hear a shout back. Not sure, I call again.
“Hello.”
“Yeah.”
“Can we come out and get him?”
“Yeah.”
Slowly, our hands up, we go out. The black cloud that rises to greet us carries with it a hot, sour smell. Solidified, his legs are heavy. I leave them to Rana and Dave, our guide lifting under his hips. The Kalashnikov is attached by sticky blood to his hair and hand and we don’t want it with us so I put my foot on it as I pick up his shoulders and his blood falls out through the hole in his back. We heave him into the pick-up as best we can and try to outrun the flies.
I suppose he was wearing flip flops because he is barefoot now, no more than 20 years old, in imitation Nike pants and a blue and black striped football shirt with a big 28 on the back. As the orderlies from the clinic pull the young fighter off the pick-up, yellow fluid pours from his mouth and they flip him over, face up, the way into the clinic clearing in front of them, straight up the ramp into the makeshift morgue.
We wash the blood off our hands and get in the ambulance. There are people trapped in the other hospital who need to go to Baghdad. Siren screaming, lights flashing, we huddle on the floor of the ambulance, passports and ID cards held out the windows. We pack it with people, one with his chest taped together and a drip, one on a stretcher, legs jerking violently so I have to hold them down as we wheel him out, lifting him over steps.
The hospital is better able to treat them than the clinic but has not got enough of anything to sort them out properly and the only way to get them to Baghdad is on our bus, which means they have to go to the clinic. We are crammed on the floor of the ambulance in case it’s shot at. Nisareen, a female doctor about my age, can’t stop a few tears once we are out.
The doctor rushes out to meet me: “Can you go to fetch a lady? She is pregnant and she is delivering the baby soon.”
Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window.
We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance. I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.
I am outraged. We are trying to get to a woman who is giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you are shooting at us. How dare you?
How dare you?
Azzam grabs the gear stick and gets the ambulance into reverse, another tyre bursting as we go over the ridge in the centre of the road, the shots still coming as we flee around the corner. I carry on singing. The wheels are scraping, burst rubber burning on the road.
The men run for a stretcher as we arrive and I shake my head. They spot the new bullet holes and run to see if we are OK. “Is there any other way to get to her,” I want to know. “La, maaku tareeq.” There is no other way.
They say we did the right thing. They say they have fixed the ambulance four times already and they will fix it again but the radiator is gone and the wheels are buckled and the woman is still at home in the dark giving birth alone. I let her down.
We can’t go out again. For one thing there is no ambulance and besides it’s dark now and that means our foreign faces can’t protect the people who go out with us or the people we pick up.
Maki is the acting director of the place. He says he hated Saddam but now he hates the Americans more.
We take off the blue gowns as the sky starts exploding somewhere beyond the building opposite. Minutes later a car roars up to the clinic. I can hear him screaming before I can see that there is no skin left on his body. He is burnt from head to foot. For sure there is nothing they can do. He will die of dehydration within a few days.
Another man is pulled from the car onto a stretcher. Cluster bombs, they say, although it is not clear whether they mean one or both of them. We set off walking to Mr Yasser’s house, waiting at each corner for someone to check the street before we cross. A ball of fire falls from a plane, splits into smaller balls of bright white lights. I think they are cluster bombs, because cluster bombs are in the front of my mind, but they vanish, just magnesium flares, incredibly bright and short-lived, giving a flash picture of the town from above.
Yasser asks us all to introduce ourselves. I tell him I’m training to be a lawyer. One of the other men asks whether I know about international law. They want to know about the law on war crimes, what a war crime is. I tell them I know some of the Geneva Conventions, that I’ll bring some information next time I come and we can get someone to explain it in Arabic.
We bring up the matter of Nayoko. This group of fighters has nothing to do with the ones who are holding the Japanese hostages, but while they are thanking us for what we did this evening, we talk about the things Nayoko did for the street kids, how much they loved her. They can’t promise anything but that they will try and find out where she is and try to persuade the group to let her and the others go.
I don’t suppose it will make any difference. They are busy fighting a war in Fallujah. They are unconnected with the other group. But it can’t hurt to try.
The planes are above us all night. As I doze I forget I’m not on a long distance flight. The constant bass note of an unmanned reconnaissance drone overlaid with the frantic thrash of jets and the dull beat of helicopters and interrupted by explosions.
In the morning I make balloon dogs, giraffes and elephants for the little ones, Abdullah, Aboudi, who is clearly distressed by the noise of the aircraft and the explosions. I blow bubbles which he follows with his eyes. Finally, finally, I score a smile. The twins, thirteen years old, laugh too. One of them is an ambulance driver; both said to be handy with a Kalashnikov.
The doctors look haggard in the morning. None has slept more than a couple of hours a night for a week. One has had only eight hours of sleep in the last seven days, missing the funerals of his brother and aunt because he was needed at the hospital.
“The dead we cannot help,” Jassim said. “I must worry about the injured.”
We go again, Dave, Rana and me, this time in a pick-up. There are some sick people close to the marines’ line who need evacuating. No one dares come out of their houses because the marines are on top of the buildings shooting at anything that moves. Saad fetches us a white flag and tells us not to worry, he has checked and secured the road, no Mujahedin will fire at us, that peace is upon us; this eleven year old child, his face covered with a keffiyeh, but for his bright brown eyes, his AK47 almost as tall as he is.
We shout again to the soldiers, hold up the flag with a red crescent sprayed onto it. Two come down from the building, cover this side and Rana mutters, “Allah-o-akbar. Please nobody take a shot at them.”
We jump down and tell them we need to get some sick people from the houses and they want Rana to go and bring out the family from the house whose roof they are on. Thirteen women and children are still inside, in one room, without food and water for the last 24 hours.
“We’re going to be going through soon clearing the houses,” the senior one says.
“What does that mean, clearing the houses?”
“Going into every one searching for weapons.” He is checking his watch, can’t tell me what will start when, of course, but there is going to be air strikes in support. “If you’re going to do this you have to do it soon.”
First we go down the street we were sent to. There is a man, face down, in a white dishdash, a small round red stain on his back. We run to him. Again the flies have got there first. Dave is at his shoulders, I am by his knees and as we reach to roll him onto the stretcher Dave’s hand goes through his chest, through the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew his heart out.
There is no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out, crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He was unarmed. He just went out the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out since. No one had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the traditions of treating the body immediately. They couldn’t have known we were coming so it’s inconceivable that anyone came out and retrieved a weapon but left the body.
He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back.
We cover his face, carry him to the pick-up. There is nothing to cover his body with. The sick woman is helped out of the house, the little girls around her hugging cloth bags to their bodies, whispering, “Baba, baba.” Daddy. Shaking, they let us go first, hands up, around the corner, then we usher them to the cab of the pick-up, shielding their heads so they can’t see him, the cuddly fat man stiff in the back.
The people seem to pour out of the houses now in the hope we can escort them safely out of the line of fire; kids, women, men, anxiously asking us where they can all go, or only the women and children. We go to ask. The young marine tells us that men of fighting age can’t leave. “What’s fighting age,” I want to know. He contemplates. “Anything under 45. No lower limit.”
It appals me that all those men would be trapped in a city which is about to be destroyed. Not all of them are fighters, not all are armed. It is going to happen out of the view of the world, out of sight of the media, because most of the media in Fallujah is embedded with the marines or turned away at the outskirts. Before we can pass the message on, two explosions scatter the crowd in the side street back into their houses.
CLIP- READ THE REST AT http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1843.jsp
Joe Wilding first visited Iraq in August 2001, and stayed in Baghdad in February-March 2003, in the month before the war and the first twelve days of bombing.
Her articles appear in ElectronicIraq, ProgressiveTrail.org and on her own website, Wildfire.
She works with Circus2Iraq, performing and running workshops for Iraqi children, is training to become a lawyer. She is currently volunteering in Fallujah to help evacuate the wounded.
9.
Date: 14 Apr 2004
Subject: The Draft Is Coming Back! (For boys and girls age 18--26)
From: phyllism5@juno.com
Become active on this one, the lives you save may be your sons and daughters or grandkids
Share this with everyone.
THE DRAFT IS COMING BACK!
If there are children in your family, READ this. There is pending legislation in the House and Senate (twin bills: S 89 and HR 163) which will time the program's initiation so the draft can begin at early as Spring 2005 -- just after the 2004 presidential election. The administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public's attention is on the elections, so our action on this is needed immediately. Details and links follow.
Even those voters who currently support us. Actions abroad may still object to this move, knowing their own children or grandchildren will not have a say about whether to fight. Not that it should make a difference, but this plan, among other things, eliminates higher education as a shelter and includes women in the draft
Also, crossing into Canada has already been made very difficult. Actions, actions, actions: Please send this on to all the parents and teachers you know, and all the aunts and uncles, grandparents, godparents.... And let your children know -- it's their future, and they can be a powerful voice for change!
Please also write to your representatives to ask them why they aren't telling their constituents about these bills -- and write to newspapers and other media outlets to ask them why they're not covering this important story.
The draft $28 million has been added to the 2004 selective service system (sss) budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005. Selective Service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005 that the system, which has lain dormant for decades, is ready for activation. Please see website: http://www.sss.gov/perfplan_fy2004.html to view the sss annual performance plan - fiscal year 2004.
The pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide.. Though this is an unpopular election year topic, military experts and influential members of Congress are suggesting that if Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan [and a permanent state of war on "terrorism"] proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to draft.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5146.htm
Congress brought twin bills, S. 89 and HR 163 forward this year, http://www.hslda.org/legislation/national/2003/s89/default.asp entitled the Universal National Service Act of 2003, "to provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons [age 18--26] in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." These active bills currently sit in the committee on armed services.
Dodging the draft will be more difficult than those from the Vietnam era. College and Canada will not be options. In December 2001, Canada and the U.S. signed a "smart border declaration," which could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in. Signed by Canada's minister of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30-point plan which implements, among other things, a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering and departing each country. Reforms aimed at making the draft more equitable along gender and class lines also eliminates higher education as a shelter. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service until the end of their current semester. Seniors would have until the end of the academic year.
WHAT TO DO:
- Tell all your friends
- Contact your media
- Contact your Senators and tell them to oppose these bills.
For the full list of representatives (53) and websites, go to:
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/cgi-bin/newseek.cgi?site=ctc&state=ca
We just can't sit and pretend that by ignoring it, it will go away. We must voice our concerns and create the world we want to live in for our children and their children's children. Submitted by Sophie Lapaire
In addition to the above suggestions of what to do, consider also sending this information to local newspapers, colleges and high schools. Unless of course you want your children, grandchildren both girls -- yes girls -- and boys to be drafted.
May God be glorified in each of our lives!
Sincerely,
Pastor Brown, an unworthy servant of a very worthy Sovereign LORD.
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do."
- Edward Everett Hale
---
Kucinich responds to Bush press conference (April 14, 2004)
http://KUCINICH.US/statements/statement-041404.php
President Bush failed again to answer the one most crucial question that is on the minds of all Americans: when will our troops come home from Iraq? Instead, he promised more of the same no-end-in sight vision that has marked this unjustified and illegitimate war from the beginning. His answers to questions about how long our forces will remain were as vague as ever and wholly predictable: “We’ll stay the course. We’ll complete the job. We must not waiver.” And, he said, the United States will continue to “occupy” – his word – Iraq “as long as necessary.” If more troops are needed, he said, he will send them. “Any concession or retreat,” he said, “will embolden the enemy.” When will the President realize that our very presence in Iraq has become a lightning rod for increased hostility and increased violence? We can’t afford to stay the course. We need a new course – a reasoned and responsible way out, not a political rationalization for keeping our troops at risk indefinitely. And sending even more troops into harm’s way. Given the President’s unhesitating willingness to send more and more of our young men and women to a war that was launched on lies and exaggerations, how long will it be before he resorts to a reinstatement of the draft to feed the demands of a thoroughly flawed and totally failed foreign policy? We went to war for the wrong reasons. We continue to be at war for the wrong reasons. And it’s time to ask the United Nations to assume responsibility so our troops can come home. This can only come about by the United States' taking an entirely new direction. We must reconnect with the world community through the United Nations, let go of ambitions to control the oil and the contracts, to privatize Iraq, or to run the government by remote control.
10.
From: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/04/11/unasked_questions/
Unasked questions
The 9/11 commission should ask who authorized the evacuation of Saudi nationals in the days following the attacks
By Craig Unger, 4/11/2004
IN ITS TOUGH QUESTIONING of Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice, the 9/11 commission has already shown itself to be more resolute than some skeptics predicted. Many Americans now realize that multiple warnings of an Al Qaeda attack on American soil crossed the desks of Bush administration officials in the months leading up to 9/11. The administration's previously unchallenged narrative has begun to unravel.
But when hearings resume on Tuesday, we may learn exactly how tough the commission is prepared to be. This time the stars will be Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, among others. When they testify -- especially Mueller -- we will see whether or not the commission has the stomach to address what may be the single most egregious security lapse related to the attacks: the evacuation of approximately 140 Saudis just two days after 9/11.
This episode raises particularly sensitive questions for the administration. Never before in history has a president of the United States had such a close relationship with another foreign power as President Bush and his father have had with the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud. I have traced more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts that went from the House of Saud over the past 20 years to companies in which the Bushes and their allies have had prominent positions -- Harken Energy, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group among them. Is it possible that President Bush himself played a role in authorizing the evacuation of the Saudis after 9/11? What did he know and when did he know it?
Let's go back to Sept. 13, 2001, and look at several scenes that were taking place simultaneously. Three thousand people had just been killed. The toxic rubble of the World Trade Center was still ablaze. American airspace was locked down. Not even Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who were out of the country, were allowed to fly home. And a plane bearing a replacement heart for a desperately ill Seattle man was forced down short of its destination by military aircraft. Not since the days of the Wright Brothers had American skies been so empty.
But some people desperately wanted to fly out of the country. That same day, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States and a long-time friend of the Bush family, dropped by the White House. He and President George W. Bush went out to the Truman Balcony for a private conversation. We do not know everything they discussed, but the Saudis themselves say that Prince Bandar was trying to orchestrate the evacuation of scores of Saudis from the United States despite the lockdown on air travel.
Meanwhile, a small plane in Tampa, Fla. took off for Lexington, Ky. According to former Tampa cop Dan Grossi and former FBI agent Manny Perez, who were on the flight to provide security, the passengers included three young Saudis. Given the national security crisis, both Grossi and Perez were astonished that they were allowed to take off. The flight could not have taken place without White House approval.
The plane taking off from Tampa was the first of at least eight aircraft that began flying across the country, stopping in at least 12 American cities and carrying at least 140 passengers out of the country over the next week or so. The planes included a lavishly customized Boeing 727 airliner that was equipped with a master bedroom suite, huge flat-screen TVs, and a bathroom with gold-plated fixtures. Many of the passengers were high-ranking members of the royal House of Saud. About 24 of them were members of the bin Laden family, which owned the Saudi Binladin Group, a multibillion-dollar construction conglomerate.
All this occurred at a time when intelligence analysts knew that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, that Saudi money was one of the major forces behind Al Qaeda, and that the prime suspect -- Osama bin Laden -- was Saudi as well.
For its part, the Bush administration has erected the proverbial stone wall on the topic of the Saudi evacuation. The White House told me that it is "absolutely confident" the Sept. 13 flight from Tampa did not take place. The FBI said "unequivocally" it played no role in facilitating any flights. The Federal Aviation Administration said that the Tampa-to-Lexington flight was not in the logs and did not take place.
But they are all wrong.
CLIP - read the whole article at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/04/11/unasked_questions/
(...) That leaves the question of the White House's participation in expediting the departure of so many Saudis who may have been able to shed light on the greatest crime in American history.
Is it possible that the long relationship between President Bush's family and the House of Saud led Bush to turn a blind eye to the Saudi role in Islamic fundamentalist terrorism? Rather than aggressively seeking justice for the victims of 9/11, did the president instead authorize the departure of rich Saudi royals without even subjecting them to interrogation?
That may be the most difficult question of all for the commission to tackle. If the commission dares to confront this issue, it will undoubtedly be accused of politicizing the most important national security investigations in American history -- in an election year, no less. If it does not, it risks something far worse -- the betrayal of the thousands who lost their lives that day, and of the living who want answers.
---
Craig Unger, the former editor of Boston Magazine, is the author of "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties" (Scribner, March 2004).
NOTE: And here is also what is posted at the website of this amazing journalist...
From: http://www.houseofbush.com/
The Great Escape
House of Bush, House of Saud begins with a single question: How is it that two days after September 11, 2001, even as American air traffic was tightly restricted, a Saudi billionaire socialized in the White House with President George W. Bush as 140 Saudi citizens, many immediate kin to Osama Bin Laden, were permitted to return to their country? A potential treasure trove of intelligence was allowed to flee the country-- including an alleged al-Qaeda intermediary who was said to have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Why did the FBI facilitate this evacuation, and why didn't the agency question the people on the planes? Why did Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of most of the hijackers, receive exclusive and preferential treatment from the White House even as the World Trade Center continued to burn?
Two Families, Deeply Entwined
The answers to these questions, and ones far more troubling, lie in the largely hidden relationship that began in the mid-1970s, when the oil-rich House of Saud struck out for America in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo and soaring oil prices. Saudi Arabia needed American military protection, access to American political power, and a place to invest its staggering cash flow, which within 5 years reached $16 million an hour. Like wildcatting oil drillers, the Saudis began prospecting among promising American politicians, including the Bush family. And with the Bushes, the Saudis hit a gusher- direct access to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, as well as to Secretary of State James Baker, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus.
A Dangerous Liaison
What followed was an amazing weave of influence, strategic investment, socializing, and secret policy between the House of Bush and the House of Saud that arcs from the 1980s into the present day. The two parties conferred on war, oil, funding for Osama bin Laden's Afghan Arabs supporting the mujahideen in the Afghanistan War, illegal arms deals, banking, private matters, and much more. By the time George W. Bush was elected, the House of Saud had transferred an astonishing sum of money to the House of Bush in deals involving dozens of companies. The total? At least $1.4 billion in investments and contracts went to companies in which the Bushes and their allies held prominent positions. But the importance of the relationship goes far beyond money. More than any other country in the world, Saudi Arabia is responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism that threatens America. Horrifying as it may seem, the secret liaison between these two great families helped trigger the Age of Terror and give rise to the tragedy of 9/11.
Exclusive Excerpts
Salon.com has just published four excerpts from House of Bush, House of Saud.
Part 1: The Great Escape
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/11/unger_1/index_np.html
Part 2: Did the Saudis buy a President?
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/12/unger_2/index_np.html
Part 3: The Arabian candidate
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/15/unger_3/index_np.html
Part 4: Lost in Transition
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/16/unger_4/index_np.html
The Author
Craig Unger served as deputy editor of the New York Observer and was the editor of Boston Magazine. He has written about George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush for the New Yorker, Esquire Magazine and Vanity Fair.
Check also http://dir.salon.com/topics/craig_unger/ and http://www.houseofbush.com/files.php
11.
Forwarded by "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net>
From: http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/4/emw117400.htm
PRESS RELEASE: Area 51 Microbiologist Ready to Talk
Area 51 Microbiologist Ready to Talk
Dr. Dan Burisch, who is in lock-down, working with the Lotus project, seeks immunity to stand before a Congressional hearing or other appropriate public body, to disclose his first-hand knowledge, with proof, of U.S. government involvement in designer viruses and other black-ops.
LAS VEGAS, NV USA (PRWEB) April 8 2004 -- Dr. Dan Burisch has first-hand knowledge of the U.S. government's involvement in funding the creation of designer viruses for use in biowarfare and other applications. He is also intimately privy to other covert operations that violate normal standards of human ethics.
Because such involvement could implicate him for war crimes charges, he requests full immunity before making such disclosure. The terms of his agreement prohibit that he should specifically request such an appointment for disclosure. He has stated that if subpoenaed he will disclose what he knows, answering specific questions directly.
By splicing together components of various organisms, microbiologists today are able to create new living organism with specific outcomes, both in terms of target as well as resulting disease.
Burisch stated that microbiologists have a way of encoding their "signature" into the designer DNA they create, whether in short sequences or those long enough to encode an entire virus.
As a possible scenario, for example, the signature could be comprised of a short segment of base-pairs that bear the microbiologists mark in such a way that other microbiologists can see the signature and readily identify it.
Because Burisch does not yet have such disclosure immunity granted, he spoke hypothetically, saying that if there were a microbiologist involved in such activities, that the microbiologist could place his signature on the resulting organism, unbeknownst to those authorizing the project. That signature could then be called forth from all progeny organisms as evidence of the laboratory origin of the organism, and of the exact microbiologist who created the organism.
This would then provide unambiguous proof more telling than finger prints in a crime scene. In this case, such finger prints are placed there intentionally with the intent of providing retrospective proof of the deed.
Burisch would also like to press for disclosure of other matters of which he has first-hand knowledge and evidence.
The revealing of his signature will also prove that Burisch is indeed a Ph.D. level microbiologist -- a title that was erased when he was inducted into his present covert operation. That erasure was so complete that one could hardly find evidence that Danny B Catselas Burisch ever lived if it were not for the Internet and private sharing of documents of evidence. Catselas was his father's last name. He had his name legally changed to Burisch with a recent marriage to a woman by that last name, who is also a principal in the covert operations.
He is presently working on the Lotus project at Area 51 north of Las Vegas, in a secret extra-budget operation under the umbrella direction of a non-elected shadow international governing body that has covert ties to the U.S. government and with extra-terrestrials.
The Lotus project involves studies of what is called a "Ganesh particle" which is capable of repairing damages cells. The Ganesh particle itself, which gives off light, has characteristics of being a living intelligence.
Burisch has witnessed an extra-terrestrial being first-hand at Area 51. That exposure included touch, probing, measuring body function, communication via hand signals.
Burisch is witness to human subjects being held against their will for experimentation per covert treaties between the U.S. government and extra-terrestrial governing bodies. The treaty, called Tau-IX, allows for abduction, removal of blood and reproductive samples and tissue; and does not control whether humans are maimed, tortured or that they might expire.
Burisch does not believe that these activities should be held back from the knowledge of the American and International lay community. His desire for disclosure is shared by others of his colleagues.
There are even those among the directorate who are helping to leak information from inside the covert operations out into public domain.
A primary vector for this disclosure has been taking place on an unmoderated forum at http://www.godlikeproductions.com under a thread about Dan Burisch that is now in its fifth volume, with over 10,000 posts in all. There, those on the "inside" of the covert operations ,who are defecting against their obligations to non-disclosure, post information to the forum where it is openly analyzed for authenticity and catalogued.
This forum thread commenced approximately six months ago and recently had been losing momentum due to lack of concrete information. Even with the occasional patch in to Burisch with a web cam, there was no way to prove that the web cam footage was not taken at a prior date.
Those on the forum were not even sure Burisch was actually alive, and that it was him that they were conversing with on these privileged disclosures on rare occasion.
As someone in the know has watched this process, he recently decided to actually let two people from the "outside" have an in-person meeting with Dr. Dan Burisch. Per a request made by a major forum participant, Harry Dschaak (forum name: harrdrawk), an invitation was extended for him and write-in U.S. Presidential Candidate, Sterling D. Allan (forum name: wallrace), to have an in-person meeting with Burisch.
A first attempt was made on April 3. The meeting was to have taken place in front of the UNLV campus Leid library at 10:00 am. The two outsiders were coming in under the cover of being inside directorate. This cover was exposed prior to the meeting when it was determined by security that there were no inside directorate coming into Vegas on the day appointed.
A second and successful attempt took place two days later at another location, where a window of one hour stretched into three as the two outsiders identified themselves with a pass code that only could have been given them from someone trusted on the inside.
On the following day, Allan reported on that encounter with a post to the GLP forum. That was then followed up the next day, April 7, with a leaked message in which Dan Burisch responded point-by-point to Allan's report, as requested by an individual named "J1 (Majesty/Directorate PD/SF, Washington, D.C.)".
The leaking of that document constitutes perhaps the most unambiguous source of information regarding this covert operation that has yet been obtained.
Within minutes of that post being made, the forum went down. But those who intimately watch the forum immediately got on the phone with each other and made a copy of the relevant page and circulated it among their mailing lists.
When asked if this is the biggest development since the forum thread commenced six months ago, Dschaak, Allan's running mate, replied, "No, this is the biggest thing to happen since the JFK assassination. We are on the verge of alien disclosure -- something we have been seeking for decades."
Dschaak is in process of assembling a brief list of questions that should be posed to Burisch in a hearing. Over the past six months, GLP has accumulated a list of key questions to ask based on the intelligence they have been gathering.
###
The above press release is found with links and follow-up at
http://www.greaterthings.com/News/ET/DanBurisch/PR040407/
REFERENCES:
http://www.greaterthings.com/News/ET/DanBurisch/April07_04_Statement/
Dan Burisch' leaked reply to Sterling Allan's report.
http://www.greaterthings.com/News/ET/DanBurisch/April04/firstdraft.htm
Allan's report of the April 5 meeting with Burisch
http://www.angelfire.com/pe/peter7/Links/DanBmeeting.html
Back-up copy of Allan's report of his meeting with Dan Burisch
http://www.angelfire.com/pe/peter7/Links/meetingResponse.html
Back-up copy of Burisch' reply to Allan.
http://www.godlikeproducions.com
See: Forum > Thread about "Burisch"
or try: http://tinyurl.com/2g7g8 (go direct)
http://www.angelfire.com/pe/peter7/project_otus/DanBurischForumLibrary.html
Peter7's library of GLP posts and key documents.
http://www.allan2004.com/press_releases/040124_extraterrestrial_frontier/
Allan/Dschaak Campaign site.
http://www.samstownlv.com/main.cfm
Sam's Town Casino, where the Burisch Interview took Place
GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT DAN BURISCH AND RELATED
http://www.skywatch-research.org/
Skywatch International, hosted by Bill Hamilton, who interviewed Burisch in a room at UNLV on Sept. 18, 2002. He also visited with Burisch in March of 2004, but was under non-disclosure in that communication, as part of the project.
http://stealthskater.com/
CONTACT:
Harry Dschaak
phone: 208-548-2448; cell: 208-431-9346
email: harry.dschaak@allan2004.com
12.
I'M INCLUDING THIS STORY WHICH IS SIMILAR TO "INSIDE THE FIRE" ABOVE BECAUSE IT HELPS CONFIRM THE ALLEGATIONS OF WIDESPREAD SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENT CIVILIANS COMING FROM SEVERAL SOURCES. COULD YOU IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT THE GLOBAL UPROAR WE WOULD HEAR IN THE MEDIA IF PALESTINIANS WITH - HYPOTHETICALLY - THE SAME FIREPOWER AS THE U.S. WERE DOING THAT TO INNOCENT PEOPLE IN AN ISRAELI CITY?... HISTORY MAY TAKE A VERY CRITICAL VIEW OF ALL THE NATIONS AND LEADERS WHO REMAINED SILENT - AND THUS BECAME ACCOMPLICES - IN FRONT OF SUCH AN HORRIFIC MILITARY PANDEMONIUM. THE WORLD MUST URGENTLY BE FREED FROM THE PENTAGONIC YOKE OF CABALIST BLACK SOULS BEFORE THEIR URGE TO KILL ENGULF THE WHOLE PLANET IN THEIR FILTHY SHADOW. AND JOHN KERRY SHOULD NOT BE LOOK AT AS THE ONE WHO WOULD DO THAT, BOTH BECAUSE OF HIS OWN BELLICOSE STATEMENTS AND BECAUSE OF HIS INVOLVEMENT, LIKE BUSH, IN SKULLS AND BONES... I SAY ONLY KUCINICH COULD DO THAT (see his statement below)
Forwarded by NCEpanacea@aol.com
Americans Slaughtering Women & Children In Falluja
By Dahr Jamail
4-14-4
I knew there was very little media coverage in Falluja, and the entire city had been sealed and was suffering from collective punishment in the form of no water or electricity for several days now. With only two journalists there that I'd read and heard reports from, I felt pulled to go and witness the atrocities that were surely being committed.
With the help of some friends, we joined a small group of internationals to ride a large bus there carrying a load of humanitarian supplies, and with the hopes of bringing some of the wounded out prior to the next American onslaught, which was due to kick off at any time now.
Even leaving Baghdad now is dangerous. The military has shut down the main highway between here and Jordan. The highway, even while just outside Baghdad, is desolate and littered with destroyed fuel tanker trucks -- their smoldering shells littered the highway. We rolled past a large M-1 tank that was still burning under an overpass which had just been hit by the resistance.
At the first U.S. checkpoint the soldiers said they'd been there for 30 hours straight. After being searched, we continued along bumpy dirt roads, winding our way through parts of Abu Ghraib, steadily but slowly making our way towards besieged Falluja. While we were passing one of the small homes in Abu Ghraib, a small child yelled at the bus, "We will be mujahedeen until we die!"
We slowly worked our way back onto the highway. It was strewn with smoking fuel tankers, destroyed military tanks and armored personnel carriers, and a lorry that had been hit that was currently being looted by a nearby village, people running to and from the highway carrying away boxes. It was a scene of pure devastation, with barely any other cars on the road.
Once we turned off the highway, which the U.S. was perilously holding onto, there was no U.S. military presence visible at all as we were in mujahedeen-controlled territory. Our bus wound its way through farm roads, and each time we passed someone they would yell, "God bless you for going to Falluja!" Everyone we passed was flashing us the victory sign, waving, and giving the thumbs-up.
As we neared Falluja, there were groups of children on the sides of the road handing out water and bread to people coming into Falluja. They began literally throwing stacks of flat bread into the bus. The fellowship and community spirit was unbelievable. Everyone was yelling for us, cheering us on, groups speckled along the road.
As we neared Falluja a huge mushroom caused by a large U.S. bomb rose from the city. So much for the cease fire.
The closer we got to the city, the more mujahedeen checkpoints we passed
-- at one, men with kefir around their faces holding Kalashnikovs began shooting their guns in the air, showing their eagerness to fight.
The city itself was virtually empty, aside from groups of mujahedeen standing on every other street corner. It was a city at war. We rolled towards the one small clinic where we were to deliver our medical supplies from INTERSOS, an Italian NGO. The small clinic is managed by Mr. Maki Al-Nazzal, who was hired just 4 days ago to do so. He is not a doctor.
He hadn't slept much, along with all of the doctors at the small clinic.
It started with just three doctors, but since the Americans bombed one of the hospitals, and were currently sniping people as they attempted to enter/exit the main hospital, effectively there were only 2 small clinics treating all of Falluja. The other has been set up in a car garage.
As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who'd been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in.
One woman and small child had been shot through the neck -- the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning.
The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life.
After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.
One victim of American aggression after another was brought into the clinic, nearly all of them women and children.
This scene continued, off and on, into the night as the sniping continued.
As evening approached the nearby mosque loudspeaker announced that the mujahadeen had completely destroyed a U.S. convoy. Gunfire filled the streets, along with jubilant yelling. As the mosque began blaring prayers, the determination and confidence of the area was palpable.
One small boy of 11, his face covered by a kefir and toting around a Kalashnikov that was nearly as big as he was, patrolled areas around the clinic, making sure they were secure. He was confident and very eager for battle. I wondered how the U.S. soldiers would feel about fighting an 11 year-old child? For the next day, on the way out of Falluja, I saw several groups of children fighting as mujahedeen.
After we delivered the aid, three of my friends agreed to ride out on the one functioning ambulance for the clinic to retrieve the wounded.
Although the ambulance already had three bullet holes from a U.S. sniper through the front windshield on the driver's side, having westerners on board was the only hope that soldiers would allow them to retrieve more wounded Iraqis.
The previous driver was wounded when one of the sniper's shots grazed his head.
Bombs were heard sporadically exploding around the city, along with random gunfire.
It grew dark, so we ended up spending the night with one of the local men who had filmed the atrocities. He showed us footage of a dead baby who he claimed was torn from his mother's chest by Marines. Other horrendous footage of slain Iraqis was shown to us as well.
My entire time in Falluja there was the constant buzzing of military drones.
As we walked through the empty streets towards the house where we would sleep, a plane flew over us and dropped several flares. We ran for a nearby wall to hunker down, afraid it was dropping cluster bombs. There had been reports of this, as two of the last victims that arrived at the clinic were reported by the locals to have been hit by cluster bombs -- they were horribly burned and their bodies shredded.
It was a long night-between being sick from drinking unfiltered water and the nagging concern of the full invasion beginning, I didn't sleep.
Each time I would begin to slip into sleep, a jet would fly over and I wondered if the full scale bombing would commence. Meanwhile, the drones continued to buzz throughout Falluja.
The next morning we walked back to the clinic, and the mujahedeen in the area were extremely edgy, expecting the invasion anytime. They were taking up positions to fight. One of my friends who'd done another ambulance run to collect two bodies said that a Marine she encountered had told them to leave, because the military was about to use air support to begin 'clearing the city.' One of the bodies they brought to the clinic was that of an old man who was shot by a sniper outside of his home, while his wife and children sat wailing inside.
The family couldn't reach his body, for fear of being sniped by the Americans themselves. His stiff body was carried into the clinic with flies swarming above it.
The already insane situation continued to degrade, and by the time the wounded from the clinic were loaded onto our bus and we prepared to leave, everyone felt the invasion was looming near. American bombs continued to fall not far from us, and sporadic gunfire continued. Jets were circling the outskirts of the city.
We drove out, past loads of mujahedeen at their posts along the streets.
In a long line of vehicles loaded with families, we slowly crept out of the embattled city, passing several military vehicles on the outskirts town.
When we took a wrong turn at one point and tried to go down a road controlled by a different group of mujahedeen, we were promptly surrounded by men cocking their weapons and aiming them at us. The doctors and patients on board explained to them we were coming from Falluja and on a humanitarian aid mission, so they let us go.
The trip back to Baghdad was slow, but relatively uneventful. We passed several more smoking shells of vehicles destroyed by the freedom fighters; more fuel tankers, more military vehicles destroyed.
What I can report from Falluja is that there is no ceasefire, and apparently there never was. Iraqi women and children are being shot by American snipers. Over 600 Iraqis have now been killed by American aggression, and the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards. Ambulances are being shot by the Americans. And now they are preparing to launch a full-scale invasion of the city.
All of which is occurring under the guise of catching the people who killed the four Blackwater Security personnel and hung two of their bodies from a bridge.
--- Dahr Jamail is Baghdad correspondent for The NewStandard. He is an Alaskan devoted to covering the untold stories from occupied Iraq. You can help Dahr continue his crucial work in Iraq by making donations. For more information or to donate to Dahr, visit http://newstandardnews.net/iraqdispatches.
---
Kucinich Says Transfer of Power Will Not Stop the Bloodshed (April 7, 2004)
http://kucinich.us/pressreleases/pr_040704.php
The June 30th transfer of power from the U.S.- led Coalition Provisional Authority to an interim Iraqi government is "a hoax intended to deceive the American people into believing that this nightmare of death and destruction is coming to an end," said Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. "There's not going to be any difference in our military posture on July 1st from what it is on June 30th," said Kucinich, adding, "Those aren't my words. Those are the words of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz." Wolfowitz made the comment to reporters last Friday, April 2, following a briefing to the House Armed Services Committee. "The only thing that is going to change is the level of violence aimed at our men and women in uniform," Kucinich said. "It will become even deadlier." At least 30 U.S. military personnel have been killed in the last 72 hours. "On June 30th, all we will be doing is transferring power from the right hand to the left hand – from the Coalition Provisional Authority to a yet-unestablished interim government chosen under the terms of a constitution written by the Bush Administration and ratified by an Iraqi Governing Council installed by the Bush Administration," Kucinich said. Despite the fanfare, pomp and ceremony surrounding the signing of that document a month ago, "The constitution actually preserves and perpetuates the continuing occupation of Iraq, and virtually guarantees that the Iraqi opposition will grow more fierce and more deadly." Kucinich quoted from a section of the constitution, which stipulates, "the laws in force in Iraq on 30 June 2004 shall remain in effect unless and until rescinded or amended by the Iraqi Transitional Government." That transitional government will be appointed only with the approval of the Coalition Provisional Authority. "It will be nothing more than a puppet government attempting to legitimize a U.S. agenda of indefinite occupation and control over a country where we have no legitimate right to be." Kucinich said the only way to end the escalating violence is to withdraw U.S. troops, bring in United Nations peacekeepers, and have the United Nations oversee a process of elections that are free and fair. Control over Iraqi oil, other assets, and reconstruction contracts should also be placed under UN supervision. "Our troops are being targeted and killed, and the Administration and others in our government keeping talking about June 30th as though it's some sort of magical date that will bring this nightmare to an end," Kucinich said. "It won't. It can't. The invasion was a mistake. The occupation is a mistake. And we're paying the price for those mistakes with American lives and the lives of innocent Iraqi citizens."
Kucinich: What do we stand for as a Party? (April 14, 2004)
"There is a lot at stake at this moment. The President has said that he intends to stay the course in Iraq. That course is one which will increase the number of deaths and injuries, not only to our troops but to many innocent people in Iraq, ultimately making Americans less safe at home and less welcome around the world. "If we continue on this course, spending upwards of $200 billion in Iraq, America will continue to sacrifice a domestic agenda that is already failing to provide sufficient funding for education, health care, housing, job creation, veterans, and environmental protection. People ask me why I continue to run for president when the nomination's already been decided. Someone has to be offering alternatives to keep our troops in Iraq from an indefinite future. Someone has to say that the Democratic Party must offer a course of action which will enable America to connect with the world community, stop the waste of our precious tax resources, stabilize Iraq, and bring our troops home. Someone has to be the voice for universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care so universally supported, and so desperately needed."
Read the entire statement at http://www.kucinich.us/messages/041404-audiopostcard-dennis.php
Kerry Has Clinched It, But Kucinich Keeps Going (April 12)
http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=1833332
Sen. John Kerry has all but secured the Democratic Party's nomination for president, but rival U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio continues campaigning. Kucinich says he's staying in the race to keep certain issues alive within the party: universal health care, trade reform and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Kucinich speaks with NPR's Bob Edwards.
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