[uruknet.info] - [daily information from occupied iraq] - [newsletter 17 Jul 2005 - Part One]

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War Crimes and The "Just War" Theory
Michel Chossudovsky, GlobalResearch.ca
...There is one important aspect of the WTI's activities at its final
sessions in Istanbul, which tends, however, to weaken the thrust of the
work accomplished in the various global sessions. It pertains to the role
of the "Just War theory" in assessing war crimes. At the WTI's Istanbul
venue, the "Panel of Advocates", which had a mandate to collect and analyze
the evidence of US war crimes, was led by Professor Richard Falk, a
protagonis! t of the "Just War" theory, who has gone on record for openly
supporting two previous US led wars (...) While Professor Falk rightly
focuses on ethical and moral principles in assessing war crimes in Iraq, he
fails to put the Iraq war in an appropriate historical perspective. War
Crimes in Iraq cannot be divorced from the broader history of US military
aggression and the crimes and atrocities committed in previous wars
including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Moral and ethical
standards for assessing war crimes cannot be formulated in a historical
vacuum or in piecemeal fashion, in defiance of the Geneva Convention and
the Nuremberg Charter, which apply unequivocally to all US led wars...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13819&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13819


Tomgram: Judith Coburn on the Unnamed Dead of Iraq
Tom Engelhardt & Judith Coburn
...How many Iraqis have died in our war in their country? Is there a better
symbol of how the war for Iraq has already been lost than our ignorance
about the cost of the war to Iraqis? "Cost of the war": a cliché to
normalize the carnage, like the anaesthetizing term "collateral damage" and
that new semantic horror, "torture lite." And yet the "cost of the war"
report, by now a hackneyed convention of American journalism, includes!
only American casualties -- no Iraqis -- itself a violation of the American
mainstream media's own professed commitment to "objectivity." Three years
of "anniversary" articles in the American media adding up the so-called
"cost of the war" in Iraq have focused exclusively on Americans killed,
American dollars spent, American hardware destroyed, with barely a mention
of the Iraqi dead as part of that "cost"...


<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13808&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13808


Iraqis and the Vanishing Food Rations
Raed Jarrar, Raed in the Middle
...I asked one of my friends who live in Baghdad about the last time they
received food rations, "last March" was the answer. My family stopped
receiving food rations earlier this year. On another note, it seems that
the new Iraqi courts don't guarantee the right to lawyers: prisoners are
neither offered the help of a public defender nor can they bring their own
lawyers. News about my sibling is so confusing, but we're expecting to know
more t! omorrow. There are more than ten thousand people in the US prisons
in Iraq, and other thousands in Iraq's governmental and paramilitary
jails...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13805&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13805


Another Casualty in Rumsfeld’s Information-war
Mike Whitney
Another chapter was added to Donald Rumsfeld’s booklet of “Information
warfare” yesterday when blogger Khalid Jarrar was picked up by Iraqi Secret
Service (Mukhabarat) and taken to an undisclosed location. Jarrar has not
been formally charged with a crime, but he is author of a popular blog
(Tell me a secret) that provides valuable information to people outside of
Iraq who are curious to know the real details of the ongoing crisis...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13797&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13797


Experts Urge Release of Iraq Scientists
CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
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. A
declassified document, meanwhile, tells of beatings and other abuse at the
same Baghdad airport detention complex (...) Ex-inspector Rod Barton, ! an
Australian biologist who was a key deputy to Duelfer, said it's
"outrageous" that the Iraqis are still held, and cited the example of Huda
Salih Mahdi Ammash, a bioweapons specialist in the 1980s. "Huda is there
accused of restarting the bioweapons program in the mid-1990s. And there
was no such program," he said...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13825&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13825


Who Murdered 32 Iraqi Children? (Truth Comes Out)
Layth, Iraqwar.mirror-world.ru - Mufakirat Al-Islam
An independent investigation of the murder last week of 32 Iraqi children
has been conducted by a local Iraqi news location (Mufakirat Al-Islam /
Islamemo.cc) with results as follows (...) - Local residents stated that
the US soldiers began handing out candy and schoolbags attracting the
children. - When residents, fearing for their children, asked about the KIA
car , the US soldiers said that it was a 'false al! arm' and that there was
no bomb (but that a couple of US soldiers remained fiddling with the car)...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13824&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13824


Official: Iraq Wants to End Its Monopolies
Associated Press
Iraq wants to launch a privatization program that would end state
monopolies over industry, an Iraqi official said Sunday on the eve of an
international meeting to assess reconstruction activities. Adel Karim, a
deputy minister for industrial development, said Iraq wants to sell cement,
brick and pharmaceutical factories as a first step. He declined to discuss
details or say if the oil sector may also be considered, but he conceded
that deteriorating sec! urity could hamper the plan...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13823&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13823


Capitalist media system naturally lied and pretended that Chavez was a dictator
VHeadline.com
...Did you know that Iraq tried some quasi socialism, by not giving their
oil wells to America's richest robber baron capitalists ... who then
decided to steal them instead ... just like what is going on right now.
That is evil oppression and maybe even hard to believe, but its true. Even
Iraq won't be left with any pie. Back when Iraq had that small element of
socialism they proved the power of that idea of state contro! l by becoming
one of the more modernized and developed countries in the region surrounded
by poor Arab countries, which is why they were bombed back into the third
world, so no one notice that even a touch of socialism is a powerful force
to make poverty history. This is all the Bolivians want. They want to kick
out the capitalist robber barons and make poverty history in Bolivia by
trying that same powerfully effective socialism idea, which is why you
never hear their story on the capitalist media system. ..

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13804&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13804


Downing St blocks envoy’s Iraq book - Report
Aljazeera.com
A controversial insider account of the Iraq war by one of Britain's most
senior former diplomats has been blocked by Downing Street and the Foreign
Office. The Observer reports that publication of “The Costs of War” by Sir
Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to the UN during the build-up to
the 2003 war and the Tony Blair’s special envoy to Iraq in its aftermath,
has been halted. In one extract Greenstock describes the American decision
to go to war a! s "politically illegitimate" and says that UN negotiations
"never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the U.S.
administration"...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13821&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13821


A Link to the Leak!
Daithí Mac Lochlainn, The Gaelic Starover
..from ABC News : “Officials tell ABC News the London bombers have been
connected to an al Qaeda plot planned two years ago in the Pakistani city
of Lahore. The laptop computer of Naeem Noor Khan, a captured al Qaeda
leader, contained plans for a coordinated series of attacks on the London
subway system, as well as on financial buildings in both New York and
Washington.” Oh, honest to God! No mention whatsoever from ABC that
Muhammad Naeem Noo! r Khan was fully coöperating with Pakistani and British
intelligence agents in monitoring al-Qaeda operatives, including those in
the United Kingdom, until the White House leaked the story to the press and
the operation was suddenly aborted.

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13812&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13812


Yoo Hoo: Peeling Back a Layer of the Bush Faction's Terrorist Connections
Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
(Via Kurt Nimmo): John Yoo, one of the little legal beavers who helped the
White House craft its infamous torture memos and develop the novel legal
theory that the "Commander-in-Chief" cannot be restrained by any law
whatsover, comes out into the open with one of the Bush Faction's darker
purposes in a recent Los Angeles Times column. Yoo, justifier of torture
and military autocracy, is now actually tea! ching young people about the
law, but he took time out from his busy schedule tainting impressionable
minds to pen a piece in which, among other things, he calls for the United
States to set up "fake" terrorist organizations, complete with its own
websites, recruitment centers, training camps and fundraising operations."
This group would also launch "fake" terrorist attacks. The idea, we're
told, is to sow confusion among al Qaeda's ranks.

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13799&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13799


GI Special 3B92: "Why Are We Still Over There" - July 17, 2005
...Sgt. Kevin Benderman, a 10 year veteran of the Army's Third Infantry
Division, refused to deploy for his 2nd tour in Iraq. He applied for
conscientious objector status, recognized by the Army Legal Code as the
right of every soldier, even in combat units. Sgt. Benderman was rejected
as a CO; his court martial is scheduled for July 28th at Ft. Stewart,
Georgia, and he faces up to 7 years in jail. 17 other soldiers from Sgt.
Benderman's unit went AW! OL, two tried to kill themselves and one had a
relative shoot him in the leg to avoid deployment. SUPPORT: SGT. BENDERMAN
and his wife MONICA have a national defense campaign. Please sign the
petition online: <http://www.bendermandefense.org >www.bendermandefense.org
Letters are sent to Representative Patricia McKinney and Secretary
Rumsfeld...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13811&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13811


Former Vietnam Combat and Commericail Pilot Firm Believer 9/11 Was Inside
Government Job
Greg Szymanski
There was no fooling former Air Force and commercial pilot Russ Wittenberg
the morning of 9/11. He knew it was an inside job from the get-go, knowing
the ‘big boys’ were up to the same dirty tricks they played in the Kennedy
assassination and Pearl Harbor. The government may have fooled millions of
Americans with its cockamamie official story, but the former fighter pilot
who flew over 100 combat missions in Vi! etnam and who sat for 35 years in
the cockpit for Pan Am and United, wasn’t one of them...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13810&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13810


Follow the Uranium
Frank Rich, The New York Times
... This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American
people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a
1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the
gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and
in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting
the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high:
this scandal is abo! ut the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the
unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13807&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13807


Bush/PNAC Iraq Lie Bombshell…If It’s True…
Jesse, Editor, TvNewsLies.org
If, and I repeat “if” the story about the Bush/PNAC administration planning
to covertly affect the outcome of the elections in Iraq is true, it proves
that this administration has lied virtually every single day since it
announced its intentions for Iraq. Every comment account democracy and free
elections would have been a lie if they intended on weighing in on the
elections...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13806&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13806


Plan Called for Covert Aid in Iraq Vote
DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER, NYTimes
In the months before the Iraqi elections in January, President Bush
approved a plan to provide covert support to certain Iraqi candidates and
political parties, but rescinded the proposal because of Congressional
opposition, current and former government officials said Saturday. In a
statement issued in response to questions about a report in the next issue
of The New Yorker, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security
! Council, said that "in the final analysis, the president determined and
the United States government adopted a policy that we would not try - and
did not try - to influence the outcome of the Iraqi election by covertly
helping individual candidates for office."...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13822&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13822


The barbaric and the civilized
Chandra Muzaffar
...While all of us would regard the terrorist act that occurred on 7/7 as
barbaric, some of us would be deeply disturbed by statements attributed to
British and American leaders in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy
which sought to present themselves as men upholding the canons of civilized
conduct. In their view -- and in the sight of the media -- they were
"defenders of civilization" under siege from barbaric elements. Nothing can
be further from the truth. If! it is barbaric to murder 52 civilians in
London, is it civilized to kill 100,000 civilians in Iraq?..

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13826&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13826


Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Saturday, 16 July 2005
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board,
the Free Arab Voice.
...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. A traffic lieutenant who asked not to be identified
told Mafkarat al-Islam that US solders came racing crazily out of the
street less than a minute before the explosion. Then after the blas! t they
did not go back to where it happened but continued to hurry out of the
area. A captain in the fire department who asked not to be identified told
Mafkarat al-Islam that the explosion was extremely powerful and left a big
crater in the earth – something that other car bombs do not do...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13802&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13802


Cheney's Chief of Staff Was Another Source for Cooper on Valerie Plame Story
Pete Yost Associated Press Writer
Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide was among the sources for a Time
magazine reporter's story about the identity of a CIA officer, the reporter
said Sunday. Until last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two
years that vice presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby and presidential
adviser Karl Rove were not involved in the leaks of CIA officer Valerie
Plame's identity...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13800&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13800


Three days of suicide bombs leave 150 dead
Michael Howard , The Guardian
Iraq's fledgling government stood accused of leaving its citizens
defenceless yesterday after a devastating three days of suicide attacks
left at least 150 people dead and more than 260 wounded. In the deadliest
bombing, one of at least 10 on Saturday, more than 98 people were killed
and 130 were injured in the town of Musayyib, south of the capital, after a
suicide bomber blew up a fuel tanker near a crowded marketplace and in
front of a Sh! ia mosque...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13820&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13820


Saddam formally charged
Reuters
The first criminal case stems from a 1982 massacre of dozens of Shiite
villagers in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt against the
former leader. Iraq's special tribunal has laid the first formal charges
against Saddam Hussein for crimes committed during his 25-year rule and
proceedings could begin "within days", the tribunal said on Sunday (...)
The case is seen as relatively minor compared to accusations of genocide
and crimes against humanity that have also been leve! lled at the former
president. But investigators say it may be easier to prove Saddam's
personal culpability in the smaller case, leading to a swift conviction and
possible death sentence...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13803&s2=18>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=13803




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