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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 July, 2005.
Viewing Iraq War NEWS articles 1 through 75 of 104.
- On June 24, Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi special correspondent for the news agency Knight Ridder, was killed by a single bullet to the head as he approached a checkpoint that had been thrown up near his home in western Baghdad by US and Iraqi troops. It is believed that the shot was fired by an American sniper. According to eyewitnesses, no warning shots were fired - Disturbing evidence of how the US occupation forces are targeting medical workers
- Iraq's U.N. ambassador accused U.S. Marines on Friday of firing at and killing his cousin in cold blood during a house raid near the western town of Haditha on June 25. - The government was asked yesterday to explain why the US failed to tell it the truth about use on Iraq of incendiary bombs, successors to the napalm used in Vietnam.
- British and American aid intended for Iraq's hard-pressed police service is being diverted to paramilitary commando units accused of widespread human rights abuses, including torture and extra-judicial killings. - These are not isolated cases. For what is extraordinary is the sense of impunity with which the torture, intimidation and murder is taking place. It is not just in Baghdad.
- Switzerland has asked the United States for information on the death of a Swiss man in Baghdad, who was shot after his car was stopped by US soldiers. - They didn't listen to these people. - Iraq, the seat of a 6,000-year-old civilization, has been devastated, its infrastructure in rubbles, its historical artifacts looted, its people raped, tortured, and killed by the thousands. There is no electricity, no water, no food, no social services -- from healthcare to education -- no security, no civil harmony... In other words, the Iraqi people have no life.
- Tawfiq Jamil hasn't worked since Saddam Hussein's government fell more than two years ago. - A major issue concerning America’s takeover of Iraq has gone totally unreported in relation to the rea looting of Iraq. This looting was not the looting of buildings in Baghdad carried out by mobs in April 2003, which received widespread media coverage. It was the major industrial-scale looting and stealing of Iraq’s resources, raw materials and technology carried out throughout 2003 and 2004 by international corporations and other entities. It went apparently either unnoticed or unreported by the media and was at least partly carried out as an official policy of the American occupation authorities and its new Iraqi puppet regime. - I urge my fellow health professionals to join me and many others in reaffirming our ethical commitment to prevent torture; to clearly state that systematic torture, sanctioned by the government and aided and abetted by our own profession, is not acceptable.
- It is difficult to determine the precise number of US servicemen accused or convicted of unlawful killings during the war. A June 6 Associated Press article concluded that "since the Iraq war began, at least 10 US military personnel have been convicted of a wide array of charges stemming from the deaths of Iraqi civilians. But only one sentence has exceeded three years." Those 10 convictions do not reflect the dozens of investigations that have not produced court martials nor the large number of prosecutions that have led to acquittals.
- In a toss-up between dodging bullets or staying indoors at night and sweating through Baghdad's stifling summer heat, Mohsin Mohammed and his family have opted to risk the bullets. - The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq dropped far more bombs during the sunset of Bill Clinton’s presidency than under President George W. Bush in the run-up to war in Iraq, RAW STORY has found. - While most of Baghdadis do not have drinking water, the American troops are swimming in a fresh water swimming pool in Baghdad's Camp Victory.
- On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. - In the pre-Iraq invasion period, one common tactic used to discredit Iraq was to talk of its “deception”. - A barrier commonly known as the Wall surrounds the Green Zone.
The wall is not a small factor in the lives of ordinary Iraqis outside it. Khalid Daoud, an employee at the Culture Ministry, still looks in disbelief at the barrier of 12-foot-high, five-ton slabs that cuts through his garden. - She is a conspiracy theorist whose political conceits have consistently been proved wrong. So why were Bush and his aides so keen to swallow Laurie Mylroie's theories on Saddam and terrorism? - There is no evidence whatsoever of the reconstruction effort that the Iraqi government and the US claim is underway. - "Zarqawi, I don't even know if he exists," said a scruffy taxi driver in Amman, and his was a typical comment. "He's like [Osama] bin Laden, we don't even know if he exists; but if he does, I support that he fights the US occupation of Iraq." - The Army has ordered nearly $5 billion in work from Halliburton Co. to provide logistics support to U.S. troops in Iraq over the next year, $1 billion above what the Army paid for similar services the previous year. - In mid-May, he traveled to Iraq with an Iranian cameraman to film archaeological sites around Babylon. After a taxi they were in was stopped in Baghdad, the two men were arrested by Iraqi security forces, who found what they suspected might be bomb parts in the vehicle.
- “Sorry, I can’t play with you,” Hanin told her friends bitterly, surrendering herself to the harsh reality of losing one of her two legs in a bloody US airstrike on her neighborhood in Sadr City in Baghdad. - It should be obvious by now al-Zarqawi is a U.S.-Israeli black op or false flag construct.
- IRAQI security forces, set up by American and British troops, torture detainees by pulling out their fingernails, burning them with hot irons or giving them electric shocks, Iraqi officials say. Cases have also been recorded of bound prisoners being beaten to death by police. - The ultimate conclusion to this ricin affair is that it was all another custom-built government lie, passed on by the media, to scare people and generate support for the invasion of Iraq. - Eleven oil fields in southern Iraq, capable of boosting the country's production to three million barrels a day will soon be tendered to international investors, the Iraqi oil ministry announced Friday.
- News stories over the last couple years portray the CIA as Maxwell Smart bunglers who allowed Osama to slip under the wire and fed bad intelligence to Bush and crew on Iraq, when in fact the bad intelligence (actually deliberately crafted propaganda) came from the Office of Special Plans and a handful of Iraqi “dissidents” such as Ahmed Chalabi, a Wolfowitz and Perle protégé and convicted embezzler. - Italy will start to pull its troops out of Iraq as planned in September and will not hasten the withdrawal because of fresh terror threats, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Friday.
- Official US. government reports on soldiers under US command killed in Iraq are so fragmented that they account for less than half of the total number, according to information uncovered as part of an inquiry by the Government of Puerto Rico regarding the total number of Puerto Rican war casualties.
- Leaders of the National Council of Churches and several member denominations marked July 4 with a petition stating vehement opposition to United States policy in Iraq.
- Nine Iraqi bricklayers detained by security forces on suspicion of involvement with armed fighters have suffocated to death while held for more than 14 hours in a police van. - Most of Iraq’s neighbors had different and conflicting positions with regard to the new war that began in March 2003. But all were in agreement that Washington’s task should not be made easy, that their victory should not come cheap, and to prevent the Americans from deploying to a new country in the region, they should be buried up to their necks in the Iraqi “swamp.”
- ''I'm sure those guys at Gitmo were thinking the same thing: How long am I going to be here?" - Some 39,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of combat or armed violence since the U.S.-led invasion, a figure considerably higher than previous estimates, a Swiss institute reported on Monday. -
It’s time the U.S. military stopped shooting journalists.
- The reality of all this is that Iraq is now a worse police state under the U.S. than it was under Saddam. Sure, Iraq has a government, but the U.S controls it. While many people in the U.S. believe that Iraq is on the road to an American style of democracy, many Iraqis are convinced that there is no road and there will be no democracy. - The Iraqi/Jordanian border is a land of desolation.
- Iraqis are selling their own blood to people who are buying supplies for relatives in need, due to a shortage, doctors say. This has caused concern over the spread of disease since the supplies are not checked for blood-bourne infections.
- Coffin makers are unable to keep up with the demand for caskets in Iraq where tens of people die every day due to the continual armed attacks and bombings. - More US War Crimes - More than 30 Baghdad youngsters, aged between six and 15, were killed yesterday in a suicide bombing that marked a new level of depravity even in a city used to daily carnage. But it will change nothing.
- We've finally become the barbarian horde that the world has always feared.
- In other words, Shock and Awe bombing would be used against Iraq to directly target the infrastructure necessary for the survival of the Iraqi civilian population, as well as threaten the use of nuclear weapons in an offensive capacity, in order to "break the will" of the Iraqi regime and force its capitulation. - Don't care what Americans think about withdrawal? Well, we should care what Iraqis think: - "If a foreign army comes to your country, you should fight them." - An inquiry in Iraq will determine if the soldiers stand trial. Only one suspect is still held. - Italian police have busted an international ring that they believe illegally supplied steroids to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and people in a dozen different countries.
- "The later the withdrawal, the greater the sacrifice and the more enormous the suffering of all involved. There is no rational reason for America to remain in occupation of Iraq." - The recent tragic death of Iraq children in an attack targeting American occupation forces highlights an insidious American tactic in Iraq. - The "Just War" theory (justum bellum) has a longstanding tradition. It can found in the writings of the Greek philosophers including Plato. It is contained in the Old Testament and was later embodied into the teachings of the early Christian Church. It has been used throughout history to uphold the dominant social order and provide a justification for waging war. - Next time the Bush Administration hints at withdrawing troops, keep these grand plans in mind.
- Any clandestine U.S. effort to influence the Iraqi elections, or to provide particular support to candidates or parties seen as amenable to working with the United States, would have run counter to Bush's assertions that the vote would be free and unfettered.
- Former U.S. arms inspectors are calling for release of the final handful of Iraqi weapons scientists still imprisoned at Baghdad's high-security detention center, where the death of one of them remains an unsolved mystery 18 months after his battered body turned up at a local hospital. - Money and power, grabbed through violence and deceit: that's the real point -- the only point -- of Bush's "war on terror." It is in fact a war of terror, where both sides use senseless murder and mass slaughter to advance their degraded ambitions. - Iraqi sources are saying that the car bombing last Wednesday that killed some 32 local children was the work not of the Iraqi Resistance but of the US occupation troops. - 15,000 Southern Oil Company workers from the General Union of Oil Employees – Iraq’s largest independent union – began a 24-hour strike today, cutting most oil exports from the south of Iraq. - IRAQ is slipping into all-out civil war, a Shia leader declared yesterday, as a devastating onslaught of suicide bombers slaughtered more than 150 people, most of them Shias, around the capital at the weekend.
- (by Seymour M. Hersh) Did Washington try to manipulate Iraq’s election? - More than two dozen doctors walked out of one of Baghdad's busiest hospitals on Tuesday to protest what they said was abuse by Iraqi soldiers, leaving about 100 patients to fend for themselves in chaotic wards. - A top Turkish general says the United States has given direct orders for the capture of rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leaders in Iraq, Turkish media reported. - .... few pictures are appearing in American papers because of a double standard that he says reflects the nature of our society. "Americans understand we are at war -- but not many people want to see the real consequences, especially when they involve one of your own. I think some publications cater to this sentiment by trying not to anger subscribers and advertisers with harsh 'in-your-face' coverage of the true nature of war." - In a trial, Saddam would have the opportunity to take the stand and explain in excruciating detail where he got his weapons of mass destruction, and how when he used them against Kurds in Halabja, the U.S. didn't seem upset at all, and when he used chemical weapons against Iran the U.S. didn't withdraw their support indeed, they continued to provide assistance in the form of intelligence and weapons. - The United States has been considering attacking Sunni insurgency centers in Syria. - In the letter from Meyer, he indicates that the British had a "need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN" Security Council Resolutions, possibly suggesting that the British and the United States were coordinating to 'trick' Saddam into starting a war.
- US and Iraqi troops have launched another offensive on the city of Fallujah in the volatile Anbar province in western Iraq. - and hold those who violate it accountable
- Before delegates from 83 world nations, Iraqi medic Salam Taha Ismail recounts the shock of heavy calibre bullets from the US sniper tearing through his ambulance top two years ago. He and his nurse had jumped into the ambulance and rushed to a Fallujah street after someone informed their field hospital that a car was hit by a missile. - So, U.S. troops have killed, maimed, and died and destroyed Iraq, with the result of installing a Shi’ite regime in Iraq that is now aligning itself with the Shi’ite regime in Iran, which U.S. officials say is a sworn enemy of the United States. And U.S. troops continue to kill, maim, and die to ensure the continuation of the Iraqi Shi’ite regime even while the president and the Pentagon consider invading Iran for the purpose of ousting the Iraqi Shi’ite regime there. - Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein has objected to insufficient access to his lawyer, in a new tape aired by a Dubai-based Arabic television station.
- SYRIA said today its border troops had been fired on by US and Iraqi forces and accused Washington, London and Baghdad of lack of cooperation in preventing insurgents infiltrating into Iraq. - Prime Minister John Howard has told the British Government that Australia will not send any more troops to Iraq. - This briefing examines the continuing use of incendiary weapons (“napalm”) by the US military in Iraq.
Pages for July, 2005
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