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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of May, 2005.
Viewing Iraq War NEWS articles 1 through 49 of 49.
- A secret document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.
- Here is a breakdown of the four-day death toll since Iraq named its new government April 28. At least 105 Iraqis and 11 U.S. soldiers have been killed. - The man who led Britain's armed forces into Iraq has said that Tony Blair and the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, will join British soldiers in prison if the military are ever prosecuted for war crimes in Iraq - US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld paid a secret visit to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and offered him freedom and possible return to public life if he made a televised request to armed groups for a ceasefire with allied forces - After two years and at least $1.2 billion, the U.S. effort to resuscitate Iraq's electrical system is still very wide of its mark. - While nearly 100,000 Iraqis and 1600 US troops have died as a result of the Iraq war and tens of thousands have been severely wounded, the war has proven to be extremely lucrative for the Houston-based oil services company Halliburton and the San Francisco-based construction company Bechtel. - "Collateral damage" is a euphemism for mass murder. It is perfectly moral to protect innocents against aggressors. It is not moral, nor has it ever been necessary, to blow up cities filled with innocent people. When a State drops bombs on another country and predictably kills innocents, it cannot be exempted from ethical culpability simply because it didn’t want to kill innocents.
- Gratuitous violence is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads." US soldiers punch, beat, and kick ordinary Iraqis.
- Now into the Iraq fiasco's third year, it's admitted there were never any weapons of mass destruction. Perpetual conflict? Endless occupation? How many lives per gallon?
- The shops facing each other on Martyrs’ Square in central Baghdad say much about the state of Iraq: on one side, a coffin-makers’ workshop does a roaring trade. Across the road, a gun shop displays pistols and leather holsters.
- 'He's like my Hannibal Lecter, he really is. He's the monster in my life,' said the wife of Charles Graner. These are the kind of evil psychotics that the US military uses. - A list of some of the liars in the Bush administration, current and past, who should be in prison.
- Over the course of the last two years, Bechtel has been making tons of money from the war on Iraq that its executives helped orchestrate. But two years after the fall of Baghdad and billions later in reconstruction contracts, the daily situation for most Iraqis is worse than it was before the war. The power grid remains unreliable. Hundreds of sewage treatment plants are still inoperable, with millions of gallons of filthy water pouring into the Tigris and Euphrates every day. The phone system is primitive at best. The trains still don’t run. The highways are cratered. The Baghdad airport serves only military flights. Schools are splashed with a coat of paint and told to reopen. When local Iraqi officials object or try to offer advice, they are ignored or bullied. 'The impression we get is that Bechtel is more powerful than the US Army.'
- The number of prisoners held in U.S. military detention centers in Iraq has risen without interruption since autumn, filling the centers to capacity and prompting commanders to embark on an unanticipated prison expansion plan. As U.S. and Iraqi forces battle an entrenched insurgency, the detainee population surpassed 11,350 last week, a nearly 20 percent jump since Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. U.S. prisons now contain more than twice the number of people they did in early October. - It has become clear that Israel played a major role in the battle for Fallujah, despite the American concern to conceal this fact. What news leaked of officers, soldiers, and even rabbis of dual citizenships that took part in the battles, some of which were killed by the resistance’s bullets, is only the tip of the iceberg. - Iraqi police hurled insults at US soldiers after two suicide car bomb blasts in Baghdad killed at least seven people and left 19 wounded, including policemen. "Since Americans invaded our country they have brought nothing but evil."
- King Abdullah of Jordan has agreed to pardon Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi political leader, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for fraud after his bank collapsed with $300m (£160m) in missing deposits in 1989.
- The killing has reached record levels. Four hundred Iraqis in the past two weeks have been killed. Yesterday 71 died in four suicide bombings in Baghdad, Tikrit and Hawija. There was also a bomb attack on a fertiliser plant in Basra, a mortar attack on the old Oil Ministry and a drive-by shooting in the capital, in which two Iraqi soldiers were killed. - The scandal of Iraqi POW abuse at Abu Ghraib has the world in an uproar. However, there is a precedent that went unnoticed and underreported of brutal treatment of Iraqi POWs — the 1991 abuse of Iraqi POWs during and after Operation Desert Storm.
- Italian troops were sent to Iraq to secure oil deals worth 300 billion dollars, and not just for post-war humanitarian purposes, an Italian television report by RAI claimed on Friday.
- A 2004 Survey reveals 85% of Iraqi households lack stable electricity, and only 54% have access to clean water. If you compare this to the situation in the 1980s, you will see a major deterioration of the situation. - Iraq announced Friday it has renewed its state of emergency for another 30 days following two weeks of insurgent-led violence that killed hundreds of people. Does that seem like liberation and democracy to you?
- U.S. TV accused of ignoring situation - Iraq on brink of civil war, analysts say. - Syria launched a military build up on its Iraq border after the American Army began a wide-ranging military operation in a region in Iraq near the Syrian border. - Upto to 10,000 Ugandans are being recruited to "work" in Iraq. "It is tragic for the Uganda government to allow its citizens to be recruited as mercenaries. It is not true that they are only going to provide guard services. How do you provide only guard services in a country like Iraq? These people will definitely shoot back when they are shot at" Awori said. - US troops have shot and killed eight Iraqis, including five civilians, during an attack on a patrol. Of course this is not the first time.
- Ten US troops were killed in action across Iraq last week. The fighting is now sustained and ferocious. Patrick Cockburn, winner of the Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism, reports from the frontline of America's war on terror.
- Anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr came out of hiding Monday for the first time since his fighters clashed with American forces in August, delivering a fiery speech demanding that coalition forces leave Iraq and that Saddam Hussein be punished. "I demand several things, including punishing Saddam and calling on the Iraqi government, religious movements and political factions to work hard to kick out the occupier," al-Sadr said. "I want the immediate withdrawal of the occupation forces." "The occupier is trying to make up a sectarian war between the Sunnis and Shiites," al-Sadr said. "It is not acceptable to direct the allegations of ugly acts committed by the occupier against the Shiites, to the Sunnis, we also condemn and denounce all the terrorist acts."
- The Resistance has released a general announcement in Al-Ramadi advising the brave people of Iraq to be aware of the evil actions perpetrated by the US and its collaborators (Iraqi occupation police and army) who have been known to fire mortar shells at residential homes and set off car bombs in shopping areas and busy districts aimed at killing civilians. - The American occupation forces resort to the arrest of Iraqi women to have pressure on their husbands or brothers in the resistance to surrender to the occupation after the war machine failed in confronting resistance. - As the death toll of troops mounts in Iraq and Afghanistan, America's military recruiting figures have plummeted to an all-time low. Thousands of US servicemen and women are now refusing to serve their country.
- A major study by the UN and Iraqi officials found that life in Iraq has decayed significantly since foreign forces invaded, following a general trend seen in most sectors since the imposition of a global embargo in 1990.
- A UK MP has said that four members of the United Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq are Israeli spies. Labour's George Galloway, who has campaigned against air strikes on Iraq, named four people he alleged were agents of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, working under false names and papers with the Unscom team. Was this the story that made Mr. Galloway a target of the neo-cons today?
- Following FAIR's call for more mainstream coverage of the "smoking gun memo"—the secret British document containing new evidence that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify its plan to invade Iraq—a steady trickle of news reports have appeared. But that coverage has been downplayed in general and is still completely absent from the nightly news.
- So, who really stole the billions of US dollars in the Iraq Oil For Food Program? This is the real question. Why is this case even before a Senate committee and NOT in a court of law? And what the heck is a British PM doing in the USA appearing in front of a US government committee being accused of some crime perpetrated in Iraq? Isn't that a first where a foreigner accused of a crime is flown into the U.S.A. to appear in front of a US government committee instead of in a court of law? - An American soldier puts a time bomb in the back of the truck of a farmer headed into Baghdad to blame bomb attacks on the resistance.
- Half of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced.
- Health experts in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, warned of a possible cholera outbreak this summer, saying they have seen an increase in cases so far this year and called for urgent action to prevent it from spreading.
- US anti-war have called for protests Sept 24-26. Huh? Why September? Bush lied, it’s all come out, they stole $9 billion and didn’t investigate, they spread radioactive waste across Iraq, and they PLANNED THE WAR IN 2002 !!! This equates to pre-meditated murder on a mass scale. Where is the logic in waiting 4 months for a protest? - Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq -- the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets -- have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said.
- THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown. - The Iraqi security forces already have an extremely bad name throughout much of Baghdad. I've had three Iraqi doctors tell me, in different hospitals at different times, that they call the Iraqi National Guard the "dogs of the Americans." - The imperial forces of the US regime are destroying Iraqi villages, just as they did in Vietnam, because the "the enemy" are in fact ordinary Iraqi people who oppose the illegal foreign occupation.
- Iraqis call it Death Street. To American soldiers, it is "I.E.D. Alley," after the improvised explosive devices - bombs - that are lethally common on the 10 miles of expressway and city streets that make up Baghdad's airport road.
- In the past year, about 10 percent of Baghdad's total force of 32,000 registered doctors - Sunnis, Shiites and Christians - have left or been driven from work, according to the Iraqi Medical Association, which licenses practitioners. A vast majority of those fleeing, he said, are the most senior doctors.
- Neocon court historians of empire, such as Niall Ferguson, claim that the US cannot withdraw from Iraq because the result would be a civil war and bloodbath. However, a bloodbath is what has been going on since the ill-fated "cakewalk" invasion.
- Iraqi journalists say they are being censored by the US-led Coalition forces and the Iraqi government because of the topics covered by them in newspapers and on television.
- Families can still stroll but militia gangs hold power in port city. General Hassan al-Sade said half of his 13,750-strong force was secretly working for political parties in Iraq's second city and that some officers were involved in ambushes. - Social organizations in El Salvador have denounced that hundreds of Salvadorans are recruited by security agencies to work as mercenaries in Iraq under the veil of private security forces.
Pages for May, 2005
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