Iraq

Or, We're Looking For a Few Good Homosexual Rapists

NEW YORK--Now it's official: American troops occupying Iraq (news - web sites) have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, America's victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers.

"Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees" by soldiers, freelance mercenaries and professional torturers under the command of CIA (news - web sites) intelligence officers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, according to an internal government report. The detainees, about 60 percent of them assumed to be innocent by the Americans themselves, were routinely beaten, sodomized "with a chemical light or broomstick," urinated upon, tied to electrified wires and threatened with death, stripped and forced to perform homosexual sex acts on each other and U.S. troops. Don't be fooled by military apologists who insist that these American SS are nothing more than a few bad apples. Seymour Hersh, who has read the army's internal report, quotes Major General Antonio Taguba as saying that U.S.-committed atrocities are "systemic, endemic throughout the command structure...[The soldier-torturers] were being told what to do and told it was OK."

from UK Telegraph -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/11/wtact11....
US tactics condemned by British officers By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent(Filed: 11/04/2004)

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".

The US Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that the US was misled by lies by the CIA and certain Iraqis. His declaration leads to very uncomfortable logical conclusions. If this is not part of some strategy to pull out from Iraq, then I am afraid, that we, as a civilization, have hit a new low.

Were these misleadings deliberate? Deliberate lies? There were millions of people marching one year ago, and presenting proof of the same lies while Mr. Powell was presenting the lies at the United Nations. This elevates the 'misleading intelligence' to deliberate lies.

Did this truth dawn on Mr. Powell yesterday? Or, did he live with the lie for so long? One year ago, he was somewhat anti-war, and then suddenly turned around and sold the war to the UN and to the American people. Is this a credibility repair exercise or a testing the water for a US withdrawal.

by Tamim al-Barghouti,
courtesty The Daily Star, Beirut

When there is colonial encounter, there are natives who believe in the colonial promise; this is an attempt to remind every contemporary King Lear with his predecessors.

In the first statement of the Arab Revolt of 1917 against the Ottomans, Sharif Hussein, the ruler of the Ottoman province of Hijaz and leader of the Revolt, did not dispute the right of the Ottoman Caliphs to rule over Muslims, nor did he portray the Ottoman presence in the Arab world as some form Turkish occupation.

To the contrary, he asserted his devotion to the authority of the caliph. However, he argued that the Caliphate had come under the control of the relatively secular Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), which neglected the teachings of Islam, and whose policies, on the eve of World War One

Running the gauntlet of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades after check-in at Baghdad airpor
- Robert Fisk - Baghdad
You need to take a military escort to reach Baghdad airport these days. Yes, things are getting better in Iraq, according to President Bush - remember that each hour that goes by - but the guerrillas are getting so close to the runways that the Americans have chopped down every
tree, every palm bush, every scrap of undergrowth on the way.
Rocket-propelled grenades have killed so many GIs on this stretch of highway that the US army - like the Israelis in southern Lebanon in the mid-80s - have erased nature. You travel to Baghdad airport through a wasteland. Heathrow it isn't.

One, Two, Three, What Are They Fighting For?
The worst problem facing US forces in Iraq may not be armed resistance but a crisis of morale.
-- Robert Fisk -Fallujah
I was in the police station in the town of Fallujah when I realised the extent of the schizophrenia. Captain Christopher Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the nature of the attacks so regularly carried out against American forces in the Sunni Muslim Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential rest home down the road - "Dreamland", the Americans call it - but this was not the extent of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are being attacked by," he

The 'threats' that Hussein posed to the United States are nowhere to be seen.

By Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, link

Now that the war has been won, is it permissible to suggest that our emperor has no clothes? I'm not referring to his abysmal stewardship of the economy but rather the fig-leaf war he donned to cover up his glaring domestic failures.

US accused of plans to loot Iraqi antiques
By Liam McDougall, Arts Correspondent
Sunday Herald - 06 April 2003

FEARS that Iraq's heritage will face widespread looting at the end of the Gulf war have been heightened after a group of wealthy art dealers secured a high-level meeting with the US administration.
It has emerged that a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy . . .

by Robert Scheer (courtesy The Nation)
How telling that U.S. forces so carefully protected Iraq's oil fields while ignoring the looting of Baghdad's internationally renowned museum. The complete, and by all accounts preventable, destruction of one of the world's most significant collections of antiquities is a fit metaphor for current U.S. foreign policy, which causes more serious damage through carelessness than calculation.

By RAY CONLOGUE - with a report from Mark MacKinnon in Baghdad - courtesy Globe and Mail, Saturday, April 19, 2003 - Page R1

For Iraq, and the world in general, it is now time to gather the stones together.

The sacking of Iraqs National Museum last weekend means that as many as 170,000 stone, clay and gold objects dating back over 8,000 years are now in the hands of looters. A few have made their way to the infamous crooked middlemen who will transport them to Europe and North America, where wealthy collectors are waiting to purchase them.