Death & Chaos in Baghdad

muckraker10021 · May 16, 2006

<img src="http://truthout.org/imgs.art_01/fyi.iraq_casualties.jpg">  <img src="http://www.middle-east-online.com/pictures/big/_15963_sadr13306.jpg">

Statistics (as of May 15th 2006) compiled by 'The McLaughlin Group' © www.mclaughlin.com
<table border="4" width="550" id="table2" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td width="329" align="center">U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides</td><td align="center">  2,448</td></tr>
<tr><td width="329" align="center"> U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, </td><td align="center">51,820</td></tr><tr>
<td width="329" align="center">Iraqi civilians dead</td><td align="center">120,993</td></tr></table>
<img src="http://www.flipsideshow.com/images/US%20Soldier%20returns%20in%20casket.jpg">

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<img src="http://knightridder.com/images/title_kr_supplemental.gif">

Visiting Iraqi Pharmacist Decries
Iraq's 'State of Terror'
<img src="http://www.dailystar.com.lb/admin/storage/articles/20063122221480.1%20Iraq.JPG">                                                                <img src="http://beltwaybandit.blogspot.com/baghdad%20bombing.jpg">

Three years of war has turned her country into shambles

by Meg Laughlin
Published March 15, 2006

TAMPA - She kept thinking it couldn't get any worse in Baghdad. But it did - over and over.

So pharmacist Entisar Mohammad Ariabi decided to come to the United States with a group of Iraqi women to tell what it's like to live through three years of war.

After traveling to Jordan and getting a monthlong U.S. visa at the American Embassy in Amman, Ariabi arrived March 5 in the United States. She spoke in St. Petersburg on Tuesday night and is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. today at the University of South Florida.

She will talk about how a city of air-conditioning, e-mail and fashionable restaurants disintegrated into explosions, gunfire and kidnapping. How the reassuring routine of day-to-day life in Baghdad became death and chaos, making people afraid to venture outside. And how she, her friends and the U.S. soldiers she knows have become increasingly depressed and bitter over the past three years.

In a Monday phone interview through a translator, Ariabi told the St. Petersburg Times that the once-modern Baghdad hospital where she works has electricity and running water only for an hour a day now, so only a small number of wounded or ill civilians can be treated.

"Those with at least a 70 percent chance of survival get attention," she said. "The rest we have to let die."

Arms and legs are buried in the hospital courtyard because there is nothing else to do with them, she says. Diseases like cholera, typhoid and polio, not seen in Iraq in decades, have returned. Cancer patients go without treatment or painkillers. Burn wounds quickly turn into deadly infections because of a shortage of staff to keep them clean.

Doctors and nurses are often attacked by desperate family members who can't bear to see loved ones suffer.

"In Baghdad, we live in a state of terror," said Ariabi, who got to this country with help from a peace group called Code Pink.
Ariabi said many Iraqis hoped for a better life when the United States invaded three years ago.

Many Shiites and Kurds cheered U.S. soldiers for freeing them from the systematic terror, murder and oppression they had experienced under Saddam Hussein.
But as bombings, shootings and kidnappings escalated against pro-American Iraqis and American troops, and the infrastructure of the country crumbled, many hopeful Iraqis despaired, she said.

"We know the U.S. soldiers wanted to bring democracy, but they have unintentionally brought misery," she said.

Ariabi, 48, is a Sunni and her husband is a Shiite. Like her son, she said many of her friends' families are mixed Sunni and Shiite who have always gotten along.
"The American notion that there will be a Sunni-Shiite civil war here if the soldiers leave is misguided," she said. "The bombings and violence are to protest the occupation, not because Sunnis and Shiites hate each other."

Ariabi's message: "It is time for the American soldiers to go home."

In the early days of the war, Ariabi, her husband and five children were able to hold on to their lives, she said. Their 11-year-old-daughter went to swimming practice every afternoon. Their teenage boy surfed the Internet and e-mailed school pals. The older children studied French and English at the university.

Every weekday, Ariabi returned from her hospital job, where she wore tailored business suits, and made dinners of meat and fresh vegetables, while the kids watched TV. They still live in their four-bedroom Mediterranean-style home of concrete and glass in a middle-class neighborhood of Baghdad. But little else from their former life is the same.
"We did not know how light our lives were," she says. "We want them back."

She returns to Baghdad at the end of March.


<img src="http://www.bushflash.com/jpg/GWBush4.jpg">

muckraker10021 · May 25, 2006

<img src="http://proquest.umi.com/i/pub/7818.gif">


As Death Stalks Iraq,
Middle-Class Exodus Begins
<table border="5" width="651" id="table3" cellspacing="1" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000" height="480">
<tr>
<td><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/18/world/19migrate.large2.jpg"> 
"The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq,” said Assad Bahjat, with his wife, Eileen, and their two children, Elvis, left, and Andres.</td>
</tr>
</table>


By SABRINA TAVERNISE

May 19, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/world/middleeast/19migration.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, — Deaths run like water through the life of the Bahjat family. Four neighbors. A barber. Three grocers. Two men who ran a currency exchange shop.

But when six armed men stormed into their sons' primary school this month, shot a guard dead, and left fliers ordering it to close, Assad Bahjat knew it was time to leave.

"The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq," said Mr. Bahjat, standing in a room heaped with suitcases and bedroom furniture in eastern Baghdad.

In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class.

Christoph Bangert/Polaris, for The New York Times

“The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq,” said Assad Bahjat, with his wife, Eileen, and their two children, Elvis, left, and Andres.

The school system offers another clue: Since 2004, the Ministry of Education has issued 39,554 letters permitting parents to take their children's academic records abroad. The number of such letters issued in 2005 was double that in 2004, according to the director of the ministry's examination department. Iraqi officials and international organizations put the number of Iraqis in Jordan at close to a million. Syrian cities also have growing Iraqi populations.

Since the bombing of a shrine in Samarra in February touched off a sectarian rampage, crime and killing have spread further through Iraqi society, paralyzing neighborhoods and smashing families. Now, on the brink of a new, permanent government, Iraqis are expressing the darkest view of their future in three years. "We're like sheep at a slaughter farm," said a businessman, who is arranging a move to Jordan. "We are just waiting for our time." The Samarra bombing produced a new kind of sectarian violence. Gangs of Shiites in Baghdad pulled Sunni Arabs out of houses and mosques and killed them in a spree that prompted retaliatory attacks and displaced 14,500 families in three months, according to the Ministry for Migration.

Most frightening, many middle-class Iraqis say, was how little the government did to stop the violence. That failure boded ominously for the future, leaving them feeling that the government was incapable of protecting them and more darkly, that perhaps it helped in the killing. Shiite-dominated government forces have been accused of carrying out sectarian killings.

"Now I am isolated," said Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave after the bombing. "I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash."

Traces of the leaving are sprinkled throughout daily life. Mr. Abdul Razzaq, who will move his family to Syria next month, where he has already rented an apartment, said a fistfight broke out while he waited for five hours in a packed passport office to fill out applications for his two young sons. In Salheyah, a commercial district in central Baghdad, bus companies that specialize in Syria and Jordan say ticket sales have surged.

Karim al-Ani, the owner of one of the firms, Tiger Company, said a busy day last year used to be three buses, but in recent months it comes close to 10. "Before it was more tourists," he said. "Now we are taking everything, even furniture."

The impact can be seen in neighborhoods here. While much of the city bustles during daytime hours, the more war-torn areas, like in the south and in Ameriya, Ghazaliya, and Khadra in the west, are eerily empty at midday. On Mr. Bahjat's block in Dawra, only about 5 houses out of 40 remain occupied. Empty houses in the area are scrawled with the words "Omar Brigade," a Sunni group that kills Shiites.

Residents have been known to protest, at least on paper. In an act of helpless fury this winter, a large banner hung across a house in Dawra that read, "Do God and Islam agree that I should leave my house to live in a camp with my five children and wife?"

"Shadows," said Eileen Bahjat, Mr. Bahjat's wife, standing with her two sons and describing what is left in the neighborhood. "Shadows and killing."
In Dawra, one of the worst areas in all of Baghdad, public life has ground to a halt. Four teachers have been killed in the past 10 days in Mr. Bahjat's area alone, and the Ahmed al-Waily primary school where the Bahjat boys, ages 12 and 8, studied, may not be able to hold final exams because of the killings. And three teachers from the Batoul secondary school were shot in late April.

Trash is collected only sporadically. On April 3, insurgents shot seven garbage collectors to death near their truck, and their bodies lay in the area for eight hours before the authorities could collect them, said Naeem al-Kaabi, deputy mayor for municipal affairs in Baghdad. In all, 312 trash workers have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months.

"Sunnis, Shiites, Christians," said Mr. Bahjat, a Christian who this month moved his family to New Baghdad, an eastern suburb, to live with a relative, before leaving for Syria. "They just want to empty this place of all people."

<table border="5" width="451" id="table1" cellspacing="1" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" height="340" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td>
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/18/world/18migrate.slide3.jpg" width="450" height="299"> Sewage filled the streets where the Bahjat family found a temporary home after fleeing their previous home.</td></tr></table>

"We must start from zero," he said. "Maybe under zero. But there is no other choice. Even with more time, the security will not improve."

It is more than just the killing that has sapped hope for the future. Iraqis have waited for five months for a permanent government, after voting in a national election in December, and though political leaders are on the brink of announcing it, some Iraqis say the amount of haggling it took to form it makes them skeptical that it will be able to solve bigger problems.
Abd al-Kareem al-Mahamedawy, a tribal sheik from Amara in southern Iraq who fought for years against Saddam Hussein, compared the process to "giving birth to a deformed child".

As if to underscore the point, a scene of sorrow unfolded just outside Mr. Mahamedawy's gate, where an extended family gathered, full of nervous movement, and absorbed the news of the strangling death of their 13-year-old boy by kidnappers. A woman brought her hands to her head in the timeworn motion of mourning.

Even with the resolve to leave, many departing Iraqis said they consider the move only temporary and hope to return if Iraq's fractious groups are united and stem the tide of the killings.

Cars and furniture are sold, but those who can afford it, like the Abdul Razzaq family, hang on to their properties. In Khadra in western Baghdad, Nesma Abdul Razzaq, Mr. Abdul Razzaq's wife, has spent the past months carefully wrapping their photographs, vases and furniture in cloth and packing them in boxes. She spoke of the sadness of the empty rooms and the pain of having to build a new life in a strange place.

"I have a rage inside myself," Mrs. Abdul Razzaq said by telephone, as her area, since last autumn, has become unsafe for a Western reporter to visit. "I feel desperate."

"I don't want to leave Iraq. But I have to for the kids. They have seen enough."

In a quiet block in Mansour, a wealthy neighborhood in central Baghdad, where stately, gated homes are lined with pruned hedges, the Kubba family spends most of its time indoors. They have hung onto their lifestyle: three of their children study violin, flute, and ballet in an arts school outside the neighborhood despite encroaching violence.

Last fall, a foul smell led neighbors to the bodies of seven family members in a house several doors down from the Kubbas. They had been robbed. Fehed Kubba, 15, went to buy bread last year and saw a crowd near the bakery that he assumed was watching a backgammon game. When he pushed in to look, he saw a man who had just been shot to death.

But it was the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence, deeply painful to Iraqis who are proud of their intermarried heritage, that tipped the scales as Falah Kubba and his wife, Samira, considered leaving with Fehed, Roula, 13, and Heya, 12.

"The past few months convinced us," said Mr. Kubba, a businessman whose wife is Sunni. "Now they are killing by ID's. The killing around Americans was something different, but the ID's, you can't move around on the streets."

"At the beginning we said, 'Let's wait, maybe it will be better tomorrow,' " Mr. Kubba said.
"Now I know it is time to go."

Mona Mahmoud, Sahar Nageeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting for this article.


<table border="5" width="451" id="table2" cellspacing="1" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000" height="340">
<tr>
<td>
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/18/world/18migrate.slide10.jpg" width="450" height="299"> 
Families fleeing Iraq boarding bus for Syria</td>
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</table>

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muckraker10021 · May 25, 2006

<img src="http://proquest.umi.com/i/pub/7818.gif">



As Death Stalks Iraq, Middle-Class
Exodus Begins
<table border="5" width="651" id="table3" cellspacing="1" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000" height="480">
<tr>
<td><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/18/world/19migrate.large2.jpg"> 
"The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq,” said Assad Bahjat, with his wife, Eileen, and their two children, Elvis, left, and Andres.</td>
</tr>
</table>


By SABRINA TAVERNISE

May 19, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/w...ration.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

BAGHDAD, Iraq, — Deaths run like water through the life of the Bahjat family. Four neighbors. A barber. Three grocers. Two men who ran a currency exchange shop.

But when six armed men stormed into their sons' primary school this month, shot a guard dead, and left fliers ordering it to close, Assad Bahjat knew it was time to leave.

"The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq," said Mr. Bahjat, standing in a room heaped with suitcases and bedroom furniture in eastern Baghdad.

In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class.

Christoph Bangert/Polaris, for The New York Times

“The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq,” said Assad Bahjat, with his wife, Eileen, and their two children, Elvis, left, and Andres.

The school system offers another clue: Since 2004, the Ministry of Education has issued 39,554 letters permitting parents to take their children's academic records abroad. The number of such letters issued in 2005 was double that in 2004, according to the director of the ministry's examination department. Iraqi officials and international organizations put the number of Iraqis in Jordan at close to a million. Syrian cities also have growing Iraqi populations.

Since the bombing of a shrine in Samarra in February touched off a sectarian rampage, crime and killing have spread further through Iraqi society, paralyzing neighborhoods and smashing families. Now, on the brink of a new, permanent government, Iraqis are expressing the darkest view of their future in three years. "We're like sheep at a slaughter farm," said a businessman, who is arranging a move to Jordan. "We are just waiting for our time." The Samarra bombing produced a new kind of sectarian violence. Gangs of Shiites in Baghdad pulled Sunni Arabs out of houses and mosques and killed them in a spree that prompted retaliatory attacks and displaced 14,500 families in three months, according to the Ministry for Migration.

Most frightening, many middle-class Iraqis say, was how little the government did to stop the violence. That failure boded ominously for the future, leaving them feeling that the government was incapable of protecting them and more darkly, that perhaps it helped in the killing. Shiite-dominated government forces have been accused of carrying out sectarian killings.

"Now I am isolated," said Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave after the bombing. "I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash."

Traces of the leaving are sprinkled throughout daily life. Mr. Abdul Razzaq, who will move his family to Syria next month, where he has already rented an apartment, said a fistfight broke out while he waited for five hours in a packed passport office to fill out applications for his two young sons. In Salheyah, a commercial district in central Baghdad, bus companies that specialize in Syria and Jordan say ticket sales have surged.

Karim al-Ani, the owner of one of the firms, Tiger Company, said a busy day last year used to be three buses, but in recent months it comes close to 10. "Before it was more tourists," he said. "Now we are taking everything, even furniture."

The impact can be seen in neighborhoods here. While much of the city bustles during daytime hours, the more war-torn areas, like in the south and in Ameriya, Ghazaliya, and Khadra in the west, are eerily empty at midday. On Mr. Bahjat's block in Dawra, only about 5 houses out of 40 remain occupied. Empty houses in the area are scrawled with the words "Omar Brigade," a Sunni group that kills Shiites.

Residents have been known to protest, at least on paper. In an act of helpless fury this winter, a large banner hung across a house in Dawra that read, "Do God and Islam agree that I should leave my house to live in a camp with my five children and wife?"

"Shadows," said Eileen Bahjat, Mr. Bahjat's wife, standing with her two sons and describing what is left in the neighborhood. "Shadows and killing."
In Dawra, one of the worst areas in all of Baghdad, public life has ground to a halt. Four teachers have been killed in the past 10 days in Mr. Bahjat's area alone, and the Ahmed al-Waily primary school where the Bahjat boys, ages 12 and 8, studied, may not be able to hold final exams because of the killings. And three teachers from the Batoul secondary school were shot in late April.

Trash is collected only sporadically. On April 3, insurgents shot seven garbage collectors to death near their truck, and their bodies lay in the area for eight hours before the authorities could collect them, said Naeem al-Kaabi, deputy mayor for municipal affairs in Baghdad. In all, 312 trash workers have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months.

"Sunnis, Shiites, Christians," said Mr. Bahjat, a Christian who this month moved his family to New Baghdad, an eastern suburb, to live with a relative, before leaving for Syria. "They just want to empty this place of all people."

<table border="5" width="451" id="table1" cellspacing="1" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" height="340" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td>
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/18/world/18migrate.slide3.jpg" width="450" height="299"> Sewage filled the streets where the Bahjat family found a temporary home after fleeing their previous home.</td></tr></table>

"We must start from zero," he said. "Maybe under zero. But there is no other choice. Even with more time, the security will not improve."

It is more than just the killing that has sapped hope for the future. Iraqis have waited for five months for a permanent government, after voting in a national election in December, and though political leaders are on the brink of announcing it, some Iraqis say the amount of haggling it took to form it makes them skeptical that it will be able to solve bigger problems.
Abd al-Kareem al-Mahamedawy, a tribal sheik from Amara in southern Iraq who fought for years against Saddam Hussein, compared the process to "giving birth to a deformed child".

As if to underscore the point, a scene of sorrow unfolded just outside Mr. Mahamedawy's gate, where an extended family gathered, full of nervous movement, and absorbed the news of the strangling death of their 13-year-old boy by kidnappers. A woman brought her hands to her head in the timeworn motion of mourning.

Even with the resolve to leave, many departing Iraqis said they consider the move only temporary and hope to return if Iraq's fractious groups are united and stem the tide of the killings.

Cars and furniture are sold, but those who can afford it, like the Abdul Razzaq family, hang on to their properties. In Khadra in western Baghdad, Nesma Abdul Razzaq, Mr. Abdul Razzaq's wife, has spent the past months carefully wrapping their photographs, vases and furniture in cloth and packing them in boxes. She spoke of the sadness of the empty rooms and the pain of having to build a new life in a strange place.

"I have a rage inside myself," Mrs. Abdul Razzaq said by telephone, as her area, since last autumn, has become unsafe for a Western reporter to visit. "I feel desperate."

"I don't want to leave Iraq. But I have to for the kids. They have seen enough."

In a quiet block in Mansour, a wealthy neighborhood in central Baghdad, where stately, gated homes are lined with pruned hedges, the Kubba family spends most of its time indoors. They have hung onto their lifestyle: three of their children study violin, flute, and ballet in an arts school outside the neighborhood despite encroaching violence.

Last fall, a foul smell led neighbors to the bodies of seven family members in a house several doors down from the Kubbas. They had been robbed. Fehed Kubba, 15, went to buy bread last year and saw a crowd near the bakery that he assumed was watching a backgammon game. When he pushed in to look, he saw a man who had just been shot to death.

But it was the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence, deeply painful to Iraqis who are proud of their intermarried heritage, that tipped the scales as Falah Kubba and his wife, Samira, considered leaving with Fehed, Roula, 13, and Heya, 12.

"The past few months convinced us," said Mr. Kubba, a businessman whose wife is Sunni. "Now they are killing by ID's. The killing around Americans was something different, but the ID's, you can't move around on the streets."

"At the beginning we said, 'Let's wait, maybe it will be better tomorrow,' " Mr. Kubba said.
"Now I know it is time to go."

Mona Mahmoud, Sahar Nageeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting for this article.


<table border="5" width="451" id="table2" cellspacing="1" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000" height="340">
<tr>
<td>
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/18/world/18migrate.slide10.jpg" width="450" height="299"> 
Families fleeing Iraq boarding bus for Syria</td>
</tr>
</table>

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Greed · May 26, 2006

Official: Iraq civilian deaths unjustified

Official: Iraq civilian deaths unjustified
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
27 minutes ago

Military investigators probing the deaths last November of about two dozen Iraqi civilians have evidence that points toward unprovoked murders by Marines, a senior defense official said Friday.

The Marine Corps initially reported 15 deaths and said they were caused by a roadside bomb and an ensuing firefight with insurgents. A separate investigation is aimed at determining if Marines lied to cover up the events, which included the deaths of women and children.

If confirmed as unjustified killings, the episode could be the most serious case of criminal misconduct by U.S. troops during three years of combat in Iraq. Until now the most infamous occurrence was the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse involving Army soldiers, which came to light in April 2004 and which President Bush said Thursday he considered to be the worst U.S. mistake of the entire war.

The defense official discussed the matter Friday only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the investigation. He said the evidence found thus far strongly indicated the killings in the insurgent-plagued city of Haditha in the western province of Anbar were unjustified. He cautioned that the probe was not finished.

Once the investigation is completed, perhaps in June, it will be up to a senior Marine commander in Iraq to decide whether to press charges of murder or other violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Three officers from the unit involved — 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif. — have been relieved of duty, although officials have not explicitly linked them to the criminal investigation.

In an indication of how concerned the Marines are about the implications of the Haditha case, their top officer, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, flew to Iraq on Thursday. He was to reinforce what the military said was a need to adhere to Marine values and standards of behavior and to avoid the use of excess force.

"Many of our Marines have been involved in life or death combat or have witnessed the loss of their fellow Marines, and the effects of these events can be numbing," Hagee said a statement announcing his trip. "There is the risk of becoming indifferent to the loss of a human life, as well as bringing dishonor upon ourselves."

A spokesman at Marine Corps headquarters in the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, declined to comment on the status of the Haditha investigation. He said no information would be provided until the probe was completed.

According to a congressional aide, lawmakers were told in a briefing Thursday that it appears as many as two dozen civilians were killed in the episode at Haditha. And they were told that the investigation will find that "it will be clear that this was not the result of an accident or a normal combat situation."

Another congressional official said lawmakers were told it would be about 30 days before a report would be issued by the investigating agency, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

Both the House and Senate armed services committees plan to hold hearings on the matter.

The New York Times reported on Friday that the civilians killed at Haditha included five men who had been traveling in a taxi and others in two nearby houses. The newspaper quoted an unidentified official as saying it was a sustained operation over as long as five hours.

Hagee met with top lawmakers from those panels this week to bring them up to date on the investigation.

"I can say that there are established facts that incidents of a very serious nature did take place," Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Senate panel, said Thursday. He would not provide details or confirm reports that about 24 civilians were killed. He told reporters he had "no basis to believe" the military engaged in a cover-up.

Separately, the Marines announced this week that a criminal investigation was under way in connection with an alleged killing on April 26 of an Iraqi civilian by Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad. No details about that case have been made public.

In the Haditha case, videotape aired by an Arab television station showed images purportedly taken in the aftermath of the encounter: a bloody bedroom floor, walls with bullet holes and bodies of women and children. An Iraqi human rights group called for an investigation of what it described as a deadly mistake that had harmed civilians.

On May 17, Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., a former Marine, said Corps officials told him the toll in the Haditha attack was far worse than originally reported and that U.S. troops killed innocent women and children "in cold blood." He said that nearly twice as many people were killed as first reported and maintained that U.S. forces were "overstretched and overstressed" by the war in Iraq.

Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was being kept apprised. Ruff said he did not expect any announcements in the next few days.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060526/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/marines_iraq_investigations

yureeka9 · May 26, 2006

I can't say it enough. Anyone that voted for George Bush is either extremely stupid or extremely evil. Or both.

QueEx · May 27, 2006

<center>In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre
Iraqi Townspeople Describe Slaying of 24 Civilians
by Marines in Nov. 19 Incident</center>

Washington Post
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 27, 2006; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 26 -- Witnesses to the slaying of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in the western town of Haditha say the Americans shot men, women and children at close range in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.

Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who said he watched and listened from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of three families, recalled hearing his neighbor across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members. "I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: 'I am a friend. I am good,' " Fahmi said. "But they killed him, and his wife and daughters."

The 24 Iraqi civilians killed on Nov. 19 included children and the women who were trying to shield them, witnesses told a Washington Post special correspondent in Haditha this week and U.S. investigators said in Washington. The girls killed inside Khafif's house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.

Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation, based on accounts of survivors and on a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student at Haditha's hospital and inside victims' houses.

An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service into the killings and a separate military probe into an alleged coverup are slated to end in the next few weeks. Marines have briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and other officials on the findings; some of the officials briefed say the evidence is damaging. Charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making a false statement are likely, people familiar with the case said Friday.

"Marines overreacted . . . and killed innocent civilians in cold blood," said one of those briefed, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who maintains close ties with senior Marine officers despite his opposition to the war.

Haditha is one of a chain of farm towns on the Euphrates River where U.S. and Iraqi forces have battled foreign and local insurgents without resolution for much of the war. The first account of the killings there was a false or erroneous statement issued the next day, Nov. 20, by a U.S. Marine spokesman from a Marine base in Ramadi: "A U.S. Marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another.''

The incident was touched off when a roadside bomb struck a Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment supply convoy. The explosion killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, who was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. Following in the footsteps of two Marine uncles and a Marine grandfather, Terrazas had planned to go to college when it was all done, his family said.

Insurgents planted the bomb on a side road off one of Haditha's main streets, placing it between two vacant lots to try to avoid killing -- and further alienating -- Haditha's civilians, residents said. It went off at 7:15 a.m. Terrazas was driving the Humvee, and he died instantly. Two other Marines in the convoy were wounded.

"Everybody agrees that this was the triggering event. The question is: What happened afterward?" said Paul Hackett, an attorney for a Marine officer with a slight connection to the case.

The descriptions of events provided to The Post by witnesses in Haditha could not be independently verified, although their accounts of the number of casualties and their identities were corroborated by death certificates.

In the first minutes after the shock of the blast, residents said, silence reigned on the street of walled courtyards, brick homes and tiny palm groves. Marines appeared stunned, or purposeful, as they moved around the burning Humvee, witnesses said.

Then one of the Marines took charge and began shouting, said Fahmi, who was watching from his roof. Fahmi said he saw the Marine direct other Marines into the house closest to the blast, about 50 yards away.

It was the home of 76-year-old Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. Although he had used a wheelchair since diabetes forced a leg amputation years ago, Ali was always one of the first on his block to go out every morning, scattering scraps for his chickens and hosing the dust of the arid western town from his
driveway, neighbors said.

Marine officials said later that one of the brothers had the only gun found among the three families, although there has been no known allegation that the weapon was fired.

Meanwhile, a separate group of Marines found at least one other house full of young men. The Marines led the men in that house outside, some still in their underwear, and away to detention.

The final victims of the day happened upon the scene inadvertently, witnesses said. Four male college students -- Khalid Ayada al-Zawi, Wajdi Ayada al-Zawi, Mohammed Battal Mahmoud and Akram Hamid Flayeh -- had left the Technical Institute in Saqlawiyah for the weekend to stay with one of their families on the street, said Fahmi, a friend of the young men.

A Haditha taxi driver, Ahmed Khidher, was bringing them home, Fahmi said.

According to Fahmi, the young men and their driver turned onto the street and saw the wrecked Humvee and the Marines. Khidher threw the car into reverse, trying to back away at full speed, Fahmi said, and the Marines opened fire from about 30 yards away, killing all the men inside the taxi.

After the killings, Fahmi said, more Americans arrived at the scene. They shouted among themselves. The Marines cordoned off the block; then, and for at least the next day, Marines filed into the houses, looked around and came out.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

The insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq said it sent copies of the journalism student's videotape to mosques in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, using the killings of the women and children to recruit fighters.

After Haditha leaders complained, the Marines paid compensation put variously by townspeople at $1,500 or $2,500 for each of the 15 men, women and children killed in the first two houses. They refused to pay for the nine other men killed, insisting that they were insurgents. Officials familiar with the investigations said it is now believed that the nine were innocent victims. By some accounts, a 25th person, the father of the four brothers killed together, was also killed.

As the official investigations conclude and fresh information continues to surface in Haditha, several aspects of the incident remain unclear or are in dispute.

For example, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, which helped break the news that spurred the military investigation, said he had been told by Marine officers that the rampage lasted three to five hours and involved two squads of Marines.

Although Marines' accounts offered in the early stages of the investigation described a running gun battle, those versions of the story proved to be false, officials briefed by the Marines said.

Also, one member of Congress who was briefed by Marines said in Washington that the shooting of the men in the taxi occurred before the shootings in the houses.

Another point of dispute is whether some houses were destroyed by fire or by airstrikes. Some Iraqis reported that the Marines burned houses in the area of the attack, but two people familiar with the case, including Hackett, the lawyer, said warplanes conducted airstrikes, dropping 500-pound bombs on more than one house.

That is significant for any possible court-martial proceedings, because it would indicate that senior commanders, who must approve such strikes and who would also use aircraft to assess their effects, were paying attention to events in Haditha that day.

The Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines have rotated back home, to California. Last month, the Marine Corps relieved Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani of command of the 3rd Battalion. Two of his company commanders were relieved of their commands, as well. Authorities said a series of unspecified incidents had led to a loss of confidence in the three.

In Haditha, families of those killed keep an ear cocked to a foreign station, Radio Monte Carlo, waiting for any news of a trial of the Marines.

"They are waiting for the sentence -- although they are convinced that the sentence will be like one for someone who killed a dog in the United States," said Waleed Mohammed, a lawyer preparing a file for Iraqi courts and the United Nations, if the U.S. trial disappoints. "Because Iraqis have become like dogs in the eyes of Americans.''

A Washington Post staff member in Iraq and staff writer Thomas E. Ricks and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6052602069.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

muckraker10021 · May 28, 2006

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Bodies of civilians killed in Haditha, Iraq, including women & children

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Photos Indicate Civilians Slain Execution-Style
An official involved in an investigation of Camp Pendleton Marines' actions in an Iraqi town cites `a total breakdown in morality.'

By Tony Perry and Julian E. Barnes, Times Staff Writers 
May 27, 2006

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...0,7543928.story?page=2&coll=la-home-headlines

WASHINGTON — Photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team have convinced investigators that a Marine unit killed as many as 24 unarmed Iraqis, some of them "execution-style," in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha after a roadside bomb killed an American in November, officials close to the investigation said Friday.

The pictures are said to show wounds to the upper bodies of the victims, who included several women and six children. Some were shot in the head and some in the back, congressional and defense officials said.

One government official said the pictures showed that infantry Marines from Camp Pendleton "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results."

The case may be the most serious incident of alleged war crimes in Iraq by U.S. troops. Marine officers have long been worried that Iraq's deadly insurgency could prompt such a reaction by combat teams.

An investigation by an Army general into the Nov. 19 incident is to be delivered soon to the top operational commander in Iraq. A separate criminal investigation is also underway and could lead to charges ranging from dereliction of duty to murder.

Both investigations are centered on a dozen Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. The battalion was on its third deployment to Iraq when the killings occurred.

Most of the fatal shots appear to have been fired by only a few of the Marines, possibly a four-man "fire team" led by a sergeant, said officials with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The same sergeant is suspected of filing a false report downplaying the number of Iraqis killed, saying they were killed by an insurgent's bomb and that Marines entered the Iraqis' homes in search of gunmen firing at them. All aspects of his account are contradicted by pictures, statements by Marines to investigators and an inspection of the houses involved, officials said.

Other Marines may face criminal charges for failing to stop the killings or for failing to make accurate reports.

Of the dead Iraqis, 19 were in three to four houses that Marines stormed, officials said. Five others were killed near a vehicle.

The intelligence team took the pictures shortly after the shooting stopped. Such teams are typically assigned to collect information on insurgents after firefights or other military engagements.

Investigators and top officers of the Camp Pendleton-based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which oversees Marine infantry, aviation and support units in Iraq, have viewed the pictures.

The incident began when a roadside bomb attached to a large propane canister exploded as Marines passed through Haditha, a town on the Euphrates River. Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, who was driving a Humvee, was killed and two other Marines were wounded.

Marines quickly determined that the bomb was a "line-of-sight" explosive that would have required someone to detonate it. Marines and Iraqi forces searched houses and other structures in the narrow, dusty streets. Jets dropped 500-pound bombs and a drone aircraft circled overhead.

Time magazine, in a report published in March, quoted witnesses, including a 9-year-old girl, Eman Waleed, who said that she saw Marines kill her grandparents and that other adults in the house died shielding her and her 8-year-old brother, Abdul Rahman.

An elder in Haditha later went to Marine officials at the battalion's headquarters to complain of wanton killings.

The Marines involved in the incident initially reported that they had become embroiled in a firefight with insurgents after the explosion. However, evidence that later emerged contradicted that version.

"There wasn't a gunfight, there were no pockmarked walls," a congressional aide said.

"The wounds indicated execution-style" shootings, said a Defense Department official who had been briefed on the contents of the photos.

The Marine Corps backed off its initial explanation, and the investigations were launched after Time published its account.

Some lawmakers are asking the Marine Corps why an investigation wasn't launched earlier if the intelligence team's pictures contradicted the squad's account. The pictures from the intelligence team would probably have been given to the battalion intelligence officer, and they should have raised questions immediately, one congressional aide said.

The intelligence teams typically comprise Marine Corps reservists, often police officers or other law enforcement officials in civilian life who travel with active-duty battalions or regiments.

Such questions were put to Marine Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee during a series of individual briefings over the last week. One focus of the administrative investigation by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell is to find out how high up the Marine Corps chain of command the misreporting went.

Military officials say they believe the delay in beginning the investigation was a result of the squad's initial efforts to cover up what happened. Military and congressional sources said there was no indication that the members of the intelligence team did anything improper or delayed reporting their findings.

"They are the guys that probably provided the conclusive, demonstrative evidence that what happened wasn't as others had described," a congressional staffer said.

The Marine Corps apologized to the families of several of those killed and made payments to compensate them for their losses. The families have denied permission to have the bodies exhumed for investigation.

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), a retired Marine colonel, said there was clearly an attempt to cover up the incident by those involved. But he said he did not think the Marine command was slow in investigating.

"There is no question that the Marines involved, those doing the shooting, they were busy in lying about it and covering it up — there is no question about it," Kline said. "But I am confident, as soon as the command learned there might be some truth to this, they started to pursue it vigorously. I don't have any reason now to think there was any foot dragging."

As Marines moved across the desert into Iraq on March 19, 2003, each Marine received a signed statement from then-Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, exhorting his troops to fight vigorously but to treat noncombatants with "decency … chivalry and soldierly compassion."

"Engage your brain before you engage your weapon," he said.

As detailed in Bing West's book "The March Up: Taking Baghdad With the 1st Marine Division," Brig. Gen. John Kelly, assistant division commander, was concerned about instances of seemingly random firing by Marines, most of them untested in combat. Kelly is now the Marine Corps' congressional liaison and has helped Hagee deliver briefings to legislators on the investigations into the Nov. 19 incident.

Hagee left for Iraq on Thursday to sternly remind Marines that harming noncombatants violates Marine policy and numerous laws governing warfare. He plans to give the same message to troops at Camp Pendleton and other Marine bases when he returns.

Haditha has been a particularly difficult area for the Marines. Officers have said they lack enough troops to do an adequate job of developing intelligence and then confronting insurgents.

A documentary shown this week on the A&E Network detailed the frustrations of a company of Marine reservists who had 23 members killed and 36 wounded during a deployment last year in Haditha.

One Marine sergeant, in an interview after his unit had returned to Columbus, Ohio, remembered a raid in which he burst into a home and came close to killing two women and a teenage boy out of rage for the deaths of fellow Marines.

Sgt. Guy Zierk, interviewed in the documentary, "Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company," said he knew at that point that he had been in Iraq too long.

Perry reported from San Diego and Barnes from Washington. Times staff writer Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.

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<img src="http://www.independent.co.uk/template/ver/gfx//new_indy_logo3.gif">


The Massacre and the Marines
US troops could face death penalty for what is see
as potentially the worst war crime since Iraqi invasion

by Raymond Whitaker
 May 28 2006 
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article620720.ece

US Marines could face the death penalty after one of their number took horrific photographs of a massacre in Iraq on his mobile phone, The Independent on Sunday has learned. 
The photographs, seized by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), show many victims shot at close range in the head and chest, execution-style, according to sources who have seen them. One image shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer. Both have been shot dead. 
Similar photographs taken by a Marines intelligence team which arrived on the scene later show that soldiers "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results", according to a US official quoted by the Los Angeles Times yesterday. 
The killing of more than 20 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha last November, first reported in the IoS two months ago, has become an international scandal after evidence from two official investigations was shown to Congressmen in the past 10 days. Democrat John Murtha, a former Marines colonel who has retained close links to the military despite his denunciation of the Iraq occupation, said Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood". 
Eyewitness accounts by local people and a video shot by an Iraqi journalism student had already called into question the Marines' version of events in Haditha just over six months ago. But the photographs by American forces could prove the crucial piece of evidence in an investigation that is now expected to result in charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making false statements against up to a dozen Marines. 
According to reports in the US, military prosecutors may seek the death penalty for those found guilty of murder. Three Marines officers have already been relieved of duty, and more may be disciplined in a separate investigation into whether there was a cover-up after the killings. 
The official account of what happened in Haditha on 19 November has gradually unravelled since the initial claim that one Marine, 20-year-old Lance-Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed when a roadside bomb went off next to a convoy of Humvees passing through the town. 
Gunmen "attacked the convoy with small-arms fire", a statement added, and the Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one. It appears that the wounded man later died, bringing the number of Iraqis killed to 24. The Marines did not begin to change their story until an Iraqi human rights group obtained the journalism student's video, which showed that no Iraqis were killed in the bomb explosion. The houses where they died were bullet-riddled inside, but had no external marks, casting doubts on the soldiers' claims that there had been a firefight. 
After Time magazine took up the story, an infantry colonel was sent to Haditha for an inquiry which concluded that the 15 civilians, including several women and six children, died as a result of the Marines' actions rather than the bombing. But at this stage the deaths were called "collateral damage". 
As the IoS reported on 26 March, the Marines were still claiming then that the nine young men who died - five in a taxi close to the scene of the bombing, plus four brothers in a nearby house - were armed fighters. One military spokeswoman blamed them for the deaths of the other 15 Iraqis, because they "placed non-combatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves". 
Details emerging from the official investigation since then have confirmed the IoS report that all the Iraqis killed were civilians, and that all the shooting that day was by the Marines. According to local people, the rampage lasted three to five hours, and one man shot by the Marines was allowed to bleed to death for hours while his pleas for help were ignored. 
The Marines involved have since been rotated back to their home base of Camp Pendleton, California. The LA Times said yesterday that most of the fatal shots appeared to have been fired by only a few of the Marines, possibly a four-man "fire team" led by a sergeant, according to officials familiar with the investigation. The same sergeant was suspected of filing a false report, blaming the bomb explosion for most of the deaths and claiming that Marines entered the Iraqis' homes in search of gunmen firing at them. 
The incident is now being described as potentially the worst war crime since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, comparable to the Abu Ghraib scandal and reminiscent of the massacre of several hundred Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968. But peace campaigners say the findings raise the prospect that other incidents reported to have involved the killing of "insurgents" actually involved the death of civilians. 
Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the War Coalition, said: "It's clear that what happened in Haditha is a war crime. It would be idle to think this is the first war crime that has been committed in the last three years. It must be assumed that more of this is going on." 


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QueEx · Jun 2, 2006

<center>U.S. accused in more Iraq civilian deaths</center>

KIM GAMEL
Associated Press
June 2, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A third set of allegations that U.S. troops have deliberately killed civilians is fueling a furor in Iraq and drawing strong condemnations from government and human rights officials.

"It looks like the killing of Iraqi civilians is becoming a daily phenomenon," the chairman of the Iraqi Human Rights Association, Muayed al-Anbaki, said Friday after video ran on television of children and adults slain in a raid in Ishaqi in March.

Al-Anbaki's comments came a day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki upbraided the U.S. military over allegations that Marines killed two dozen unarmed civilians in Haditha, calling it "a horrible crime." They were his strongest public comments on the subject since his government was sworn in last month.

U.S. commanders have ordered new ethics training for all troops in Iraq. But the flow of revelations and investigations threatens to undermine Iraq's new government and public support in America for President Bush's management of the war.

Iraq's government also began its own investigation of the deaths in Haditha.

In addition to the Haditha case, in which Marines are alleged to have gunned down 24 civilians in a rage of revenge for a bombing that killed a Marine in November, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman could face murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges as early as Friday in the April shooting death of an Iraqi man, a defense attorney said Thursday.

Military prosecutors plan to file the charges against the men, who are being held in solitary confinement at Camp Pendleton, Calif., Marine Corps base, said Jeremiah Sullivan III, who represents one of the men.

The Los Angeles Times and NBC News said troops may have planted an AK-47 and a shovel near the body to make it appear as if the man was an insurgent burying a roadside bomb. Neither suggested a possible motive.

The U.S. military had no additional comment Friday on the accusations stemming from a raid March 15 in the village of Ishaqi, about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

In March, the U.S. military said four people died when they attacked from the ground and air a house suspected of holding an al-Qaida operative. The house was destroyed.

But video shot by an AP Television News cameraman at the time and aired on March 15 shows at least five children dead. The video shows at least one adult male and four young children with obvious entry wounds to the head. One child has an obvious entry wound to the side caused by a bullet.

The March report spelled the village's name as Isahaqi.

Local Iraqis said there were 11 total dead, and charged that they were killed by U.S. troops before the house was leveled.

The video includes an unidentified man saying "children were stuck in the room, alone and surrounded."

"After they handcuffed them, they shot them dead. Later, they struck the house with their planes. They wanted to hide the evidence. Even a 6-month-old infant was killed. Even the cows were killed, too," he said.

The video included shots of the bodies of five children and two men wrapped in blankets.

Other video showed the bodies of three children in the back of a pickup truck that took them to the hospital in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's former hometown.

Police Capt. Laith Mohammed said the March 15 attack that hit Ishaqi involved U.S. warplanes and armor.

Riyadh Majid, who identified himself as the nephew of Faez Khalaf, the head of the household who was killed, told AP at the time that U.S. forces landed in helicopters and raided the home.

Khalaf's brother, Ahmed, said nine of the victims were family members who lived at the house and two were visitors.

The U.S. military, which said in March that the allegations were being investigated, said it was targeting and captured an individual suspected of supporting foreign fighters of the al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist network. It had no further comment Friday.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, said at a news conference Thursday that "about three or four" inquiries were being carried out around the country, but he would not provide any details.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Friday defended the training and conduct of U.S. troops and said incidents such as the alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians shouldn't happen.

"We know that 99.9 percent of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner. We also know that in conflicts things that shouldn't happen, do happen," he said. "We don't expect U.S. soldiers to act that way, and they're trained not to."

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called the allegations "very, very serious" and said the world will see a thorough military investigation.

"If people are found to have committed crimes, those people will be held responsible and they will be held accountable," Gonzales said Friday in an interview with WOAI-AM, a radio station in San Antonio. "The president expects that, and I know the leadership in the military wants to see that happen as well."

Iraqi officials and relatives also said U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women - one of them about to give birth - when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The U.S. military said coalition troops fired at a car after it entered a clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post but failed to stop despite repeated visual and auditory warnings. It said the incident was being investigated.

Army Brig. Gen. Donald Campbell, the chief of staff of the Multinational Corps-Iraq, said at a briefing Friday that incidents of misconduct could result from the stress and fear of battling an enemy that doesn't abide by the rules of war, and often cannot be distinguished from the civilian population.

"It doesn't excuse the acts that have occurred, and we're going to look into them. But I would say it's stress, fear, isolation and, in some cases, they're just upset. They see their buddies getting blown up on occasion, and they could snap," Campbell said.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/14725384.htm

muckraker10021 · Jun 3, 2006

<img src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/SiteManagement/SiteWide/Images/bantop_NN_060208.jpg"
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<img src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/Art/NIGHTLY/Evergreen/pic_h_williams_brian_03.jpg">Back in New York Posted by Brian Williams, Anchor & Managing Editor (04:54 pm ET, 06/ 2/06)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/
 ...where the color of the sky is a kind of end-of-the-world green and rain is coming down Jakarta-style. Local stations are doing weather bulletins, and Manhattan is under a Flash Flood Watch... that's unusual. This same weather system led to a boisterous, bouncy and long-delayed flight back from New Orleans... but we're back in our home studio tonight.

Tonight it's our job to sort out various allegations of civilian deaths of Iraqis at the hands of the U.S. military. This is awful material. And with fair warning, I'm going to link to a site containing some of the pictures being distributed. Two warnings: 1) We do not know who did this to these people, and 2) as you're about to be told again if you click through to the link: Be absolutely sure you want to see these images... which involve the shocking, graphic and horrible deaths of adults and children in Ishaqi, Iraq. 
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U.S.-led raid kills civilians north of Balad
Police, American military differ on number of casualties

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/03/15/iraq.main/

BAGHDAD (CNN) -- A U.S.-led raid on a suspected site of terror network al Qaeda in Iraq killed 11 civilians -- including five children -- according to Iraqi police, but the U.S. military said the death toll from the strike north of Balad was four.

In addition to the children, the youngest of whom was 6 months old, the dead included four women and two men, police said.

A U.S. military spokesman said a suspected insurgent, two women and a child were killed in the raid on a building about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Balad.

U.S.-led forces came under fire as they raided the building, said Maj. Tim O'Keefe. Air support fired on the site, and the targeted building and a vehicle were destroyed, O'Keefe said.

A man suspected of being a "foreign fighter facilitator" was taken into coalition custody and is being questioned.

Police Capt. Laith Mohammed told The Associated Press that U.S. warplanes and armor were involved in the strike, which flattened a house and killed the 11 people inside. (Gallery -- Viewer discretion advised)

An AP reporter at the scene said the roof of the house collapsed, three cars were destroyed and two cows killed.

AP photographs showed the bodies of two men, five children and four other covered bodies arriving at a hospital in Tikrit accompanied by grieving relatives.</td>
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Late Friday, an Army investigation cleared U.S. troops of any misconduct, but the images are out there, and they are having an impact. This is awful stuff. If you have any doubt, don't go there. You've been warned. The images and the issue are sickening. Coverage of these charges and these scenes must be counter-balanced by some sort of discussion of the pressures of combat, in my view... which we will do tonight with Gen. Barry McCaffrey (ret.).

=============================================================================================
 The following page contains graphic images of dead Iraqi civilians, including children.
Please do not click on this link if you do not wish to see these photos 
=============================================================================================

<img src="http://rawstory.com/images/ishaqi/ishaqia.jpg">
 <img src="http://rawstory.com/images/ishaqi/ishaqib.jpg">
 <img src="http://rawstory.com/images/ishaqi/ishaqic.jpg">
 <img src="http://rawstory.com/images/ishaqi/ishaqid.jpg">
 <img src="http://rawstory.com/images/ishaqi/ishaqie.jpg">
 <img src="http://rawstory.com/images/ishaqi/ishaqif.jpg">
 <img src="http://rawstory.com/images/ishaqi/ishaqig.jpg">
 <img src="http://www.sunflower.com/~420/mar6/mar15ish3.jpg"> <img src="http://rawstory.com/images/ishaqi/ishaqih.jpg">
 <a href="http://www.chris-floyd.com/march/">MORE PHOTOS, AND A DETAILED ACCOUNT OF THE INCIDENT, ARE AVAILABLE HERE</a>


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QueEx · Jun 4, 2006

<center>In Haditha Killings, Details Came Slowly
Official Version Is at Odds With Evidence</center>

Washington Post
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 4, 2006; Page A01

At 5 p.m. Nov. 19, near the end of one of the most violent days the Marine Corps had experienced in the Upper Euphrates Valley, a call went out for trucks to collect the bodies of 24 Iraqi civilians.

The unit that arrived in the farming town of Haditha found babies, women and children shot in the head and chest. An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times. A group of girls, ages 1 to 14, lay dead. Everyone had been killed by gunfire, according to death certificates issued later.

The next day, Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman in Iraq, released a terse statement: Fifteen Iraqis "were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately after the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."

Despite what Marine witnesses saw when they arrived, that official version has been allowed to stand for six months. Who lied about the killings, who knew the truth and what, if anything, they did about it are at the core of one of the potentially most embarrassing and damaging events of the Iraq war, one that some say may surpass the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison.

The Marine Corps is saying only that it would be inappropriate to comment while investigations are underway. But since that Saturday afternoon in November, evidence has been accumulating steadily that the official version was wrong and misleading. The more military investigators learned about what happened that day in Haditha, the more they grew disturbed.

On Nov. 29, the Marine unit in question -- Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment -- had a memorial service at a Marine base for Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, a well-liked 20-year-old from El Paso, Tex. He was killed in a roadside bomb explosion that appears to have been the trigger for what looks to investigators like revenge shootings of Iraqi civilians. Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones said that Terrazas had been "like a brother to me." Staff Sgt. Travis Fields, Terrazas's platoon sergeant, called him "a man of heart." Not long after the bodies were discovered, Maj. Dana Hyatt, a Marine reservist whose job in part was to work with the civilian population when damage was inflicted by the U.S. military, paid out $38,000 in compensation to the families of the 15 dead. The Iraqis received the maximum the United States offers -- $2,500 per death, plus a small amount for other damage.

Kilo Company did not dwell on what happened Nov. 19. Mike Coffman, who was a Marine Reserve officer in Haditha at the time, recalled that another officer, telling him about the incident, "indicated to me that he thought from the beginning that it was overreaction by the Marines, but he didn't think anything criminal had occurred."

When the Haditha city council met in January for the first time in many months, "none of them [Iraqi members] ever raised it as an issue," said Coffman, who attended the meeting. Rather, he said, they complained about how car and truck traffic in the area had been shut down after two Marines were killed at a checkpoint bombing.

That same month, a top military official arrived in Iraq who would play a key role in the case: Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the new No. 2 military officer in the country. He is an unusual general in today's Army, with none of the "good old boy" persona seen in many other top commanders. He had praised an article by a British officer that was sharply critical of U.S. officers in Iraq for using tactics that alienated the population. He wanted U.S. forces to operate differently than they had been doing.

Not long after Chiarelli arrived in Baghdad, an Iraqi journalism student gave an Iraqi human rights group a video he had taken in Haditha the day after the incident. It showed the scene at the local morgue and the damage in the houses where the killings took place. The video reached Time magazine, whose reporters began questioning U.S. military officials. Pool, the Marine captain, sent the reporters a dismissive e-mail saying that they were falling for al-Qaeda propaganda, the magazine said recently. "I cannot believe you're buying any of this," he wrote. Pool declined last week to comment on any aspect of the Haditha incident.

But Army Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a more senior spokesman in Baghdad, notified Chiarelli of the questions. The general's response to his public affairs office was short: Just brief the Time magazine reporter on the military investigation into the incident that Chiarelli assumed had been conducted.

The surprising word came back: There had been no investigation.

Chiarelli told subordinates in early February he was amazed by that response, according to an Army officer in Iraq. He directed that an inquiry commence as soon as possible. He wanted to know what had happened in Haditha, and also why no investigation had begun.

Army Col. Gregory Watt was tapped to start an investigation and by March 9, he told Chiarelli that he had reached two conclusions, according to the Army officer.

One was that death certificates showed that the 24 Iraqis who died that day -- the 15 the Marines said had died in the bomb blast and others they said were insurgents -- had been killed by gunshot rather than a bomb, as the official statement had said. The other was that the Marine Corps had not investigated the deaths, as is the U.S. military's typical procedure in Iraq, particularly when so many civilians are involved. Individually, either finding would have been disturbing. Together, they were stunning.

On March 10, the findings were given to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, the first Marine ever to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rumsfeld told aides that the case promised to be a major problem. He called it "really, really bad -- as bad or worse than Abu Ghraib," recalled one Pentagon official. On March 11, President Bush was informed, according to the White House.

At the Marine Corps headquarters, there was "genuine surprise at high levels," said an Army officer who has been working with the Marine Corps on the case. "It caught a lot of people off guard."

That weekend, almost four months after the incident, "we went to general quarters," recalled one Marine general, using the naval expression for the call to arms. The following Monday, March 13, Marine officers began briefing key members of Congress on defense-related committees. Their message was succinct: Something highly disturbing had happened in Haditha, and its repercussions could be serious. The alacrity of the Marine response surprised some of Rumsfeld's aides in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. OSD, as it is called at the Pentagon, told the Marine Corps a few days later not to say anything to anyone about the investigation, recalled the general. Too late, the Marines responded, we've already briefed Capitol Hill.

The Marines began their own investigation almost immediately, following up on Watt's inquiry, but quickly realized that to credibly examine the acts of their top commanders in Iraq, they would need someone outside their service. The Army offered up Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell, a career Special Operations officer who first saw combat as a sergeant in the Vietnam War, to look into the matter. The Marines, who are part of the Navy Department, also turned over the question of criminal acts to agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Notified on March 12, the NCIS immediately sent a team of three Iraq-based investigators to Haditha, one of the most violent areas in Iraq. A few days later, as the scope of the case sank in, it dispatched a team of reinforcements from the United States.

But even then, nothing had been made public about the November event that might have distinguished it from Iraq's daily bloodshed. Then, on March 19, the Time magazine article appeared. "I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head," the magazine quoted Eman Waleed, 9, as saying. Most of the victims were shot at close range, the director of the local hospital told Time.

The first public indication that the military was taking those allegations seriously came on April 7, when Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, a reserved, quietly professional officer from northwestern Colorado, was relieved of command of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, Kilo Company's parent unit. Also removed were two of his subordinates -- Kilo's commander, Capt. Luke McConnell, and the commander of another company. Even then, the Marine Corps didn't specify why the actions were taken, beyond saying that the officers had lost the confidence of their superiors.

Then, on May 17, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) let the news slip out. In the middle of a rambling statement at the outset of a news conference on Capitol Hill, he said -- almost as an aside -- that what happened in Haditha was "much worse than reported in Time magazine." He asserted that the investigations would reveal that "our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

The reporters present barely focused on what Murtha had said. When the congressman finished his statement, the first reporter asked about Iraqi security forces. The second asked about U.S. troop withdrawals. The third asked about congressional support for Murtha's resolution calling for a U.S. pullout from Iraq. Finally, the fourth asked about Haditha. Murtha responded with a bit more detail: "They actually went into the houses and killed women and children. And there was about twice as many as originally reported by Time." Even then, his comments captured little attention and were not front-page news.

It took a few days for the horror of what Murtha was talking about to sink in. "This is just My Lai all over again," Vaughan Taylor, a former military prosecutor and instructor in criminal law at the Army's school for military lawyers, said last week. "It's going to do us enormous damage."

The facts of the shooting incident seem now to be largely known, with military insiders saying that recent news articles are similar to the internal reports they have received from investigators. But considerable mystery remains about how Marine commanders handled the incident and contributed to what some officials suspect was a coverup. "The real issue is how far up the chain of command it goes," said one senior Marine familiar with the case. "Who knew it, and why didn't they do something about it?"

The Marine Corps still has not corrected its misleading Nov. 20 statement asserting that the Iraqi civilians were killed in a bomb blast. A Marine Corps spokesman didn't return calls on Friday asking why it had not.

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6060300710.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

muckraker10021 · Jun 5, 2006

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KILLING FIELDS
Iraq Is the Republic of Fear

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy.
They, too, are killing Iraqis.

<img src="http://www.taqrir.org/images/309-3.jpg">
by Nir Rosen 
Sunday, May 28, 2006 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052601578.html 
Every morning the streets of Baghdad are littered with dozens of bodies, bruised, torn, mutilated, executed only because they are Sunni or because they are Shiite. Power drills are an especially popular torture device.

I have spent nearly two of the three years since Baghdad fell in Iraq. On my last trip, a few weeks back, I flew out of the city overcome with fatalism. Over the course of six weeks, I worked with three different drivers; at various times each had to take a day off because a neighbor or relative had been killed. One morning 14 bodies were found, all with ID cards in their front pockets, all called Omar. Omar is a Sunni name. In Baghdad these days, nobody is more insecure than men called Omar. On another day a group of bodies was found with hands folded on their abdomens, right hand over left, the way Sunnis pray. It was a message. These days many Sunnis are obtaining false papers with neutral names. Sunni militias are retaliating, stopping buses and demanding the jinsiya , or ID cards, of all passengers. Individuals belonging to Shiite tribes are executed.

Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq "the republic of fear" and hoped it would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

At first, the dominant presence of the U.S. military -- with its towering vehicles rumbling through Baghdad's streets and its soldiers like giants with their vests and helmets and weapons -- seemed overwhelming. The Occupation could be felt at all times. Now in Baghdad, you can go days without seeing American soldiers. Instead, it feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their masked militiamen blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles, shooting into the air, angrily shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their Kalashnikovs at passersby.

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis.

Last fall I visited the home of a Sunni man called Sabah in the western Baghdad suburb of Radwaniya, where the Sunni resistance had long had a presence, and where a U.S. soldier had recently been killed. On Friday night a few days before I came, his family told me, American soldiers surrounded the home where Sabah lived with his brothers, Walid and Hussein, and their families and broke down the door. The women and children were herded outside, walking past Sabah, whose nose was broken, and Walid, who had the barrel of a soldier's machine gun in his mouth. The soldiers beat the men with rifle butts, while the Shiite Iraqi translator accompanying the troops exhorted the Americans to execute the Sunnis.

As the terrified family waited outside, they heard three shots from inside. It then sounded to them as though there was a scuffle inside, with the soldiers shouting at each other. Thirty minutes later the translator emerged with a picture of Sabah. "Who is Sabah's wife?" he asked. "Your husband was killed by the Americans, and he deserved to die," he told her. At that he tore the picture before her face.

Walid was then taken away, and inside the house the family found Sabah dead. His bloody shirt showed three bullet holes that went through his chest; two of the bullets had come out of his back and lodged in the wall behind him. Three U.S.-made bullet casings were on the floor. Sofas and beds had been overturned and torn apart; tables, closets, vases of plastic flowers, all were broken and tossed around. Even the cars had been destroyed. Photographs of Sabah had been torn up and his ID card confiscated. One photograph remained on his wife's bureau: Sabah standing proudly in front of his Mercedes.

I later asked Hussein if they wanted revenge. "We are Muslim, praise God," he said, "and we do not want revenge. He was innocent and he was killed, so he is a martyr."

Across town, U.S. troops had also raided the Mustapha Huseiniya, a Shiite place of worship in the Ur neighborhood. The Huseiniya, similar to a mosque, belonged to the nationalistic and anti-occupation Moqtada al-Sadr movement, and in front of its short tower were immense signs with images of the movement's important clerics. The Sadr militia, known as the Army of the Mahdi, had been using the Huseiniya as a base for counterinsurgency operations. Mahdi militiamen kidnapped Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency, tortured them until they confessed on video, and then executed them.

When the Americans raided the Huseiniya, they brought Iraqi troops with them. They killed not only Mahdi fighters but also innocent Shiite bystanders, including a young journalist I knew named Kamal Anbar, in what witnesses described to me as summary executions. Although neighbors blamed the U.S. troops, Iraqi troops were so laden with gear, flak jackets and helmets provided by the Americans, they were often indistinguishable.

When I visited the next morning, the Huseiniya's floors, walls and ceilings were stained with blood; pieces of brain lay in caked red puddles. Just as Shiites cheered when the Americans hit Sunni targets, Sunni supporters of the insurgency greeted news of the U.S. raid with satisfaction.

The Mahdi militiamen were already back in force that morning, blocking off the roads and searching all who approached, wielding Iraqi police-issue Glock pistols and carrying Iraqi police-issue handcuffs. In Baghdad and most of Iraq, the police are the Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army is the police. The same holds for the actual Iraqi army, posted throughout the country.

The sectarian tensions have overtaken far more than Iraq's security forces and its streets. Militias now routinely enter hospitals to hunt down or arrest those who have survived their raids. And many Iraqi government ministries are now filled with the banners and slogans of Shiite religious groups, which now exert total control over these key agencies. If you are not with them, you are gone.

For instance, in the negotiations between parties after the January 2005 elections, Sadr loyalists gained control over the ministries of health and transportation and immediately began cleansing them of Sunnis and Shiites not aligned with Sadr. The process was officially known by the Sadrists as "cleansing the ministry of Saddamists." Indeed, some government offices now do not accept Sunnis as employees at all.

Based on my visits to the ministries, it is clear that an apartheid process began after the Shiites' electoral success. In the Ministry of Health, you see pictures of Moqtada al-Sadr and his father everywhere. Traditional Shiite music reverberates throughout the hallways. Doctors and ministry staffers refer to the minister of health as imami, or "my imam," as though he were a cleric. I also saw walls adorned with Shiite posters -- including ones touting Sadr -- in the Ministry of Transportation. Sunni staffers have been pushed out of both ministries, while the Ministry of Interior is under the control of another Shiite movement, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (its name alone a sufficient statement of its intentions).

Shiites with no apparent qualifications have filled the ranks. In one case in the transportation ministry, a Sunni chief engineer was fired and replaced with an unqualified Shiite who wore a cleric's turban to work. In all cases, this has led to a stark drop in efficiency, with the health and transportation ministries barely functioning, and the interior ministry operating much like an anti-Sunni death squad, with secret prisons uncovered last November, and people disappearing after raids by shadowy government security units operating at night.

Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn't unite Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites, and perhaps that was inevitable given their bitter history of mutual hostility. Instead, as the fighting against the Americans intensified, tensions between Sunni and Shiite began to grow, eventually setting off the vicious sectarian cleansing that is Iraq today.

During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites' indifference.

But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle of violence escalated from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad's Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.

This is when sectarian cleansing truly began. Sunni refugees in Amriya seized homes vacated by Shiites. These operations were conducted by insurgents as well as relatives of the refugees. Soon such cleansing had become widespread and commonplace, both out of vengeance and out of its own cruel logic; both sides took part. There was no space left in Iraq for nonsectarian voices. Sunnis and Shiites alike were pushed into the arms of their respective militias, often joining out of self-defense. Shiites obtained lists of the Baath party cadres that were the foundation of Hussein's regime and began systematically assassinating Sunnis who had belonged. Sunni militias that had fought the American occupier became Sunni militias protecting Sunni territory from Shiite incursions and retaliating in Shiite areas. The insurgency became secondary as resistance moved to self-defense. In the Shiite-dominated south, meanwhile, Shiite militias battled each other and the British forces.

In November I asked a close Shiite friend if -- considering all this violence, crime and radicalism in Iraq -- life had not been better under Hussein.

"No," he said definitively. "They could level all of Baghdad and it would still be better than Saddam. At least we have hope."

A few weeks later, though, he e-mailed me in despair: "A civil war will happen I'm sure of it . . . you can't be comfortable talking with a man until you know if he was Shia or Sunni, . . . Politicians don't trust each other, People don't trust each other. [There is] seeking revenge, weak government, separate regions for the opponents . . . We have a civil war here; it is only a matter of time, and some peppers to provoke it."

The time came on Feb. 22, when the Golden Mosque of the Shiites in Samarra was blown up. More than 1,000 Sunnis were killed in retribution, and then the Shiite-controlled interior ministry prevented an accurate body count from being released. Attacks on mosques, mostly Sunni ones, increased. Officially, Moqtada al-Sadr opposed attacks on Sunnis, but he unleashed his fighters on them after the bombing.

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

nirrosen@yahoo.com

Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of "In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq" (Free Press).

African Herbsman · Jun 6, 2006

Everything the administration touches turns to shit.

glueguy · Jun 6, 2006

African Herbsman said:
Everything the administration touches turns to shit.

you are right man. and yet white people still support this shit, yet call themselves christans

actinanass · Jun 7, 2006

Before people PASS judgement on our soldiers, can we PLEASE sort through the legal process? I mean damn is this DUKE RAPE CASE remix? If they did it, they did it, if they didnt GET OFF IT.

Another thing, the bullet shells that were on the ground looks like AK 47 shells. M16 casings more than likely have black paint on them. However, don't look for the media to actually make note of that.

muckraker10021 · Aug 14, 2006

Statistics (as of July 5th 2006) compiled by 'The McLaughlin Group' ©
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.mclaughlin.com">www.mclaughlin.com</a> 
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<tr><td align="center" width="329">U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides</td><td align="center">  2,530</td>
</tr><tr><td align="center" width="329"> U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, </td><td align="center">60,010</td></tr><tr><td align="center" width="329">Iraqi civilians dead</td><td align="center">127,890</td></tr></table>

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Commanders Orders - "Kill all military age men"
Military Investigators found that Col. Steele and other officers handed out knives to U.S. troops as rewards for killing


By Borzou Daragahi and Julian E. Barnes
Times Staff Writers

August 3, 2006

BAGHDAD — Military prosecutors and investigators probing the killing of three Iraqi detainees by U.S. troops in May believe the unit's commanders created an atmosphere of excessive violence by encouraging "kill counts" and possibly issuing an illegal order to shoot Iraqi men.

At a military hearing Wednesday on the killing of the detainees near Samarra, witnesses painted a picture of a brigade that operated under loose rules allowing wanton killing and tolerating violent, anti-Arab racism.

Some military officials believe that the shooting of the three detainees and the killing of 24 civilians in November in Haditha reveal failures in the military chain of command, in one case to establish proper rules of engagement and in the other to vigorously investigate incidents after the fact.

"The bigger thing here is the failure of the chain of command," said a Defense Department official familiar with the investigations.

As allegations of U.S. troop misconduct in Iraq have mounted, the military's defenders have maintained that most were isolated incidents and that officers and investigators working within the military justice system had succeeded in ferreting out the truth.

The military's primary report on the Haditha incident, completed this year, does not explicitly accuse the Marine command in Iraq of a cover-up. But the investigation cites several instances of information being ignored or evidence being destroyed, including log entries from the day the killings took place. The Defense official, who has reviewed the report, spoke on condition of anonymity because the findings have not been released.

Initial findings of investigators looking into the Samarra incident may be even more troubling. Military officials are investigating Army Col. Michael Steele, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade, whose soldiers are accused of killing the three Iraqi detainees.
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</tr><tr><td><center>Army Col. Michael Steele</center></td></tr></table></div>
Investigators are trying to determine whether Steele issued an illegal order to "kill all military aged males" and encouraged unrestrained killing by his troops.

On Wednesday, a military court heard testimony from a witness who suggested that a culture of racism and unrestrained violence pervaded the unit.

The account of Pfc. Bradley Mason and other witnesses bolstered the findings of investigators who say the brigade's commanders led soldiers to believe it was permissible to kill Iraqi men.

Military prosecutors allege that four U.S. soldiers killed three unarmed Iraqi detainees during the May 9 raid. If convicted on charges of premeditated murder, Pfc. Corey R. Claggett, Spc. William B. Hunsaker,
Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard and Spc. Juston R. Graber could face the death penalty.

Wednesday's hearing was held at the 101st Airborne headquarters near Tikrit, Iraq, and is a preliminary investigation, equivalent to a civilian grand jury. The hearing is scheduled to continue today.

Mason said that just before "Operation Iron Triangle" began on an island in Tharthar Lake near Samarra,
Steele and other officers ordered them to "engage and kill all military age men."

The Defense official familiar with the investigation said that even if Steele did not issue a verbal order, many in the brigade believed that was what the commander wanted.

A spokeswoman said the military could not respond to the specific allegations against Steele until the investigation was completed.

A senior military officer has sent a potentially career-ending reprimand to Steele, an officer who once commanded a Ranger company sent into Mogadishu, Somalia, on a rescue mission that was recounted in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down." However, the administrative action is not final because Steele has signaled that he is going to fight the accusations and the reprimand.

Steele has refused to testify in the case of the four soldiers, citing his right against self-incrimination, unless he is given immunity, prosecutors said.

The colonel has a reputation as a tough but potentially reckless commander. Investigators have found that Steele handed out knives to U.S. troops as rewards for killing insurgents, a defense official said. The investigation of Steele was first reported Tuesday by ABC News.

Before the Tharthar raid, Claggett and Hunsaker had not yet notched a kill on a brigade chart nor earned their knives from Steele, the defense official said.

The primary prosecution witness Wednesday was Mason, who testified under a grant of immunity. Mason has admitted making several false statements to investigators, and defense lawyers are likely to challenge his credibility.

Mason depicted a unit that had embraced a violent ethos and was routinely hostile to ordinary Iraqis. Commanders encouraged soldiers to compete to rack up "enemy kills," he said. A board at their headquarters that showed the numbers of Iraqis killed served to reinforce the message. "Let the bodies hit the floor," read a phrase at the bottom of the board.

"That's another terrorist down," Mason quoted Girouard as telling soldiers after they killed someone. "Good job."

Soldiers referred to ordinary Iraqis derogatorily as "hajis," a reference to Muslims who have made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and considered the 10 or so Iraqi army soldiers and interpreters working for their unit as mostly "terrorists," Mason said. Under questioning, Mason acknowledged saying that even before he arrived in Iraq, he asserted that "every man, woman and child in Iraq deserves to die."

On May 8, the day before the raid, Steele reportedly addressed a group of about 100 soldiers.

"We're going in tomorrow," he told them, according to 1st Lt. Justin Werheim, another prosecution witness. "We're going to hit the ground shooting, and kill all the Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgents."

The rules of engagement were unambiguous, Werheim said, and came down "several times" via Capt. Daniel Hart, who also has requested immunity.

"We were to positively identify and kill any military-age male on the island," Werheim said.

Another witness, Pfc. Jason R. Joseph, said the soldiers believed their orders were to kill any military-age males who were not surrendering. "They were to kill any males who didn't have their hands in the air," he said.

The soldiers arrived by helicopter as dawn broke, and Mason testified that they expected to take heavy fire after they landed. Mason said that as they approached one house, he unleashed a burst of six to nine rounds from his weapon, killing an "old man" standing in the window.

Mason testified that there was no Iraqi gunfire that morning. When defense lawyers asked him why he killed the man, Mason said those were his orders.

"We were told to kill all the males on the island," he testified. "We don't fire warning shots."

Inside the house where Mason shot the man, soldiers found three men cowering behind a pair of women, Mason testified. The soldiers pulled the men outside and bound their hands with plastic handcuffs before searching the house. They found nothing but an AK-47 and a few rounds of ammunition, allowed by law.

Claggett and Hunsaker smiled when Girouard said they were going to kill the detainees, already handcuffed and disarmed, according to Mason's account. "I told [Girouard] I'm not down with it," he said. "It's murder."

Mason testified that he stayed in the house while the other four soldiers took the detainees outside. He heard Hunsaker yell out a profanity, and then heard automatic weapon fire, followed by two shots from a semiautomatic assault rifle, Mason testified. Prosecutors believe that Claggett and Hunsaker shot and killed the detainees.

Mason testified that Claggett told him two of the detainees had broken free of their plastic cuffs, and that one of them had lunged at Hunsaker with a knife, giving him a scratch. The other had punched Claggett in the face. The soldiers then shot and killed the three detainees.

But Claggett later told him that Girouard had punched Claggett and cut Hunsaker to justify the killings, Mason said, adding that men in the squad also began threatening and pressuring Mason to keep quiet. Mason said Girouard threatened to kill him if he informed.

Defense Department officials said that officers in Mason's company and brigade failed to investigate the shooting, even after Mason and others raised concerns.

The failure echoes the findings of the Haditha investigation. The Times reported in June that portions of the Haditha report, compiled by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell, show senior Marine officers missed a number of "red flags" that should have led them to uncover an attempt to obscure the details of the incident.

The investigation was completed last month, but Pentagon officials have declined to release the findings. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that it would not be made public until after Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, had finished reviewing it.

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Daragahi reported from Baghdad and Barnes from Washington. Times staff writers Peter Spiegel in Washington and Tony Perry in San Diego contributed to this report.

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"Kill All Military Age Men!" America's Heroes on Trial


by Gary Leupp

August 5, 2006

Col. Michael Steele is a hero to some for his role in the "Black Hawk Down" affair in Somalia back in 1993.
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</tr><tr><td><center>Army Col. Michael Steele</center></td></tr></table></div>Recall that the first President Bush had sent in U.S. troops on a "humanitarian" mission, maintained by his successor Bill Clinton. The duties of the men under Steele's command included capturing militia leaders considered unfriendly to the U.S. and its local favorites. In the course of performing such missions in Mogadishu, Steele's Rangers lost two Black Hawk helicopters and 18 men---while U.S. forces killed about 1000 Somali civilians in a "rescue operation." The 2001 film "Black Hawk Down" depicts the episode from the imperialist point of view, glorifying Steele (played by Jason Isaacs, best known to many as the evil Lucius Malfoy in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire").

Recently acquiring more glory in Iraq, Steele has boasted of his unit's death count. Last November he declared, "We are absolutely giving the enemy the maximum opportunity to die for his country." This piece of petty bravado indicates that the colonel at least recognizes that the Iraqis he faces are indeed men fighting for their country, against an invader. What to do with these patriots, but to kill them?

Recall that four U.S. soldiers have recently been charged with murdering three Iraqi civilians. It happens that they were all under the Col. Steele's command, and Steele has been reprimanded in connection with the incident. More than that, he is under investigation for issuing an order to his men during "Operation Iron Triangle" in Samarra on May 9 to "kill all military age males." His men, as part of their defense, are claiming he did.

The phrase "all military age males" surfaced earlier in official commentary on the rape of Fallujah. Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, who commanded the 5th Marine Battalion in Fallujah in 2004 told the London Guardian that "95% of those" killed by U.S. forces "were military age males that were killed in the fighting That's fine, because they'll get whipped up, come out fighting again and get mowed down ... Their only choices are to submit or die." (Submit to the invaders, kids. Or have your fucking jihadi heads blown off.)

In the Black Hawk Down episode, a certain Spc. John Stebbins helped rescue Ranger comrades from the righteous wrath of the Somalis. He was your all-American hero for a time, but his part got written out of the Hollywood "Black Hawk Down" script. (He'd been convicted of raping his preteen daughter and sentenced to 30 years in Leavenworth Prison.) Reportedly the Pentagon, intimately involved in the propaganda film project, urged that the Stebbins role be omitted. Just too embarrassing. Neither the Pentagon nor Hollywood wants to glorify soldiers who've been exposed as total scumbags.

Even in the current warmongering atmosphere---intensified by the U.S.-endorsed Israeli assault upon Lebanon---it can be difficult to urge public reverence for those linked to the indiscriminate killing of civilians. Not impossible, mind you; the currently comatose Ariel Sharon, found responsible by an Israeli court for the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla, was pronounced "a man of peace" by the current American president. But more difficult in the present quasi-democracy than under a thoroughly fascist regime. So let's hope that the investigations into these murders clarify for millions more the viciousness and rapacity of the whole so-called "War on Terrorism."

"Kill all military age men." Free-fire zone, any 13 year-old boy fair game. Mow the boys down! says the heroic colonel. Let them die for their country. Show them what happens when they hijack planes in the U.S. and kill Americans. There's evil in the Muslim Arab world, and it has attacked us. We (the good) respond with righteous wrath, with shock and awe and moral certitude. We are trying to give freedom to the Iraqi people, in order to stop terrorism. But a lot of them fight us because they hate freedom. In self-defense in certain areas where there are lots of insurgents, we have to kill all military age men.

No doubt this was the argument fed the four soldiers mentioned above, whose case is being heard by a military court in Tikrit. Polls show a staggering majority of the troops actually believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9-11 attacks. That suggests that their commanders have been telling them a lot that is simply wrong.

Steele among other Army officers has announced his intention not to testify at the hearing in Tikrit. So have the four, invoking their right not to incriminate themselves. One of them, a Sgt. Raymond Girouard, has been accused by Private First Class Bradley Mason of threatening him before he testified about the May 9 incident: "If you say anything, I'll kill you."

Here we have, I submit, a Hollywood movie so much richer than "Black Hawk Down." A courtroom film, with lots of legalistic eloquence and lots of battlefield flashbacks. I'd love to hear Jason Isaacs bark, "Kill all military age men!" Maybe that would arouse some moral indignation in the audience at the terrorist quality of the war in Iraq.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion.

gene cisco · Aug 14, 2006

No this can't be right. Bush, hannity, and rush tell me the iraqis enjoy their freedom and apple pie.

Most off they enjoy elections, we know how voting cures everything just like it does in america. Somehow a war criminal won our elections so good luck with that voting thing. Ye will learn voting is just choosing between which corporate pawn you want to take the screwing from.

Poor iraqi bastards got caught in the greed of a few. Somebody is raking in them billions a month and it aint any iraqis.

Lay with the devil and take the pitchfork in the rectum. Certain shites wanted this, just so they could control iraq. Good luck bucko.

I hate bush and wish a house would fall on his ass. I feel he is taking away the little freedom I had. But I'd be dam if I want another country coming to invade us just cause our president is a war criminal.

Bet the average iraqi would suck sasquach cock to have life with sodam back.

Nobody running this cares bout iraq, they to busy trying to figure out how not to pay taxes on the billions they making off this 'war'.

I really do feel sorry for the iraqi people and our troops caught up in this money making scheme.

'Why do they hate us, why why why ??????'

GET YOU HOT · Aug 15, 2006

There are images and there are stories that won't make Newsweek or Time or U.S. News and certainly won't make the 6'oclock news or discussion around the dinner table...First hand story...

"When I was in Iraq, i saw a kid get killed" said the soldier,

-How?

"A guy in my platoon fired a warning shot in to a car" he said,

-silence....

"The kid he killed was in the car with his Dad, and he was trying to drive off... so the soldier shot into the car", his palms turned up as to reason with me...

-silence...

"He was 5 years old" his voice trailing off, long pause.............."Shit gets covered up all the time" he said.

-silence, pause, turn my head to walk away...thinking how tragic it is, for all involved.

muckraker10021 · Aug 18, 2006

<img src="http://i.today.reuters.com/images/logo.gif">

Court Told US Troops Gang-Raped Iraqi Girl


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060807/ts_nm/iraq_mahmudiya_dc


August 7th 2006

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A U.S. military court in Baghdad heard graphic testimony on Monday of how three U.S. soldiers took turns raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl before murdering her and her family.

At the hearing into whether four U.S. soldiers should be court-martialled for rape and murder, a special agent described what took place in Mahmudiya in March, based on an interview he had with one of the men, Specialist James Barker.

The case, the fifth involving serious crimes being investigated by the U.S. military in Iraq, has outraged Iraqis and led Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to call for a review of foreign troops' immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law.

Special Agent Benjamin Bierce recalled that Barker described to him how they put a couple and their six-year-old daughter into a bedroom of their home, but kept the teenage girl in the living room, where Barker held her hands while Sergeant Paul Cortez raped her or tried to rape her.

Barker then switched positions with Cortez and attempted to rape the girl but said he was not sure if he had done so, Bierce told the hearing.
<div align="right"><table border="3" width="247" id="table2" bordercolorlight="#000000" bordercolordark="#000000" align="right" bgcolor="#CCFFCC"><tr><td height="320"><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Abeer%27s_id_card.jpg"></td>
</tr><tr><td><center>Identification cards issued by the Iraqi government show Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi (C) in 1993 with a date of birth of August 19, 1991. A U.S. military court heard graphic testimony on Monday on how U.S. soldiers took turns to hold down and rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdered her and her family. </center></td></tr></table></div>

Barker also told the special agent he heard shots from the bedroom and shortly afterwards Private Steven Green emerged from the room, put down an AK-47 assault rifle and raped the girl while Cortez held her down.

SHOT HER SEVERAL TIMES

Barker told Bierce that Green then picked up the weapon and shot her once, paused, and shot her several more times.

Military prosecutors are expected to set out their case against Private First Class Jesse Spielman, 21, Barker, 23, Cortez, 23 and Private First Class Bryan Howard, 19, who face charges of rape and murder among others.

If court-martialled after the Article 32 hearing -- the military's equivalent of a U.S. grand jury -- and found guilty, they could face the death penalty. The hearing began on Sunday and is expected to last several days.

Green, 21, faces the same charges in a U.S. federal court in Kentucky, home of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, his former unit. Green, who has pleaded not guilty, was discharged from the army for a "personality disorder."

A fifth soldier, Sergeant Anthony Yribe, is charged with dereliction of duty and making a false statement and will also appear at the hearing at a U.S. base in Baghdad.

Defense Attorney Captain Jimmie Culp was blowing chewing gum bubbles while Yribe, sitting to his left, began sucking on a red lollipop during the testimony.

An Iraqi army medic told the hearing on Sunday he entered the house and found the body of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi naked and burned from the waist up, with a single bullet wound beneath her left eye.

Special Agent Gary Griesmyer recounted Cortez' account of the day. "While they were playing cards and drinking Iraqi whiskey, the idea came to go out to an Iraqi house, rape a woman and murder her family," he testified.

Cortez said Barker told the young girl to "shut up" after she was raped, Griesmyer said.

Bierce said Barker told him he poured kerosene from a lamp on to the girl. It was not clear who set her on fire.

Barker later signed a sworn statement based on the interview, in which he said that on the day of the attack he, Cortez, Spielman and Green had been playing cards and drinking whisky mixed with an energy drink. They then went to the rear of the checkpoint where they were based to hit golf balls.

Green said he wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis, Barker wrote in his sworn statement.

After the rape and murders, he wrote that he began to grill chicken wings.

The hearing continues. 

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="10"></hr>

<img src="http://i.today.reuters.com/images/logo.gif">

Court Hears Closing Arguments In Iraq Rape Case



http://today.reuters.com/news/artic...=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage3

August 8th 2006

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A prosecutor told a U.S. military court on Tuesday four soldiers should be court-martialled on charges of murder and the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl because the case had nothing to do with the strains of war.

"Murder, not war. Rape, not war. That's what we're here talking about today. Not all that business about cold food, checkpoints, personnel assignments," the prosecutor, Captain Alex Pickands, said as the court heard closing arguments.

"Cold food didn't kill that family. Personnel assignments didn't rape and murder that 14-year-old little girl. They gathered together over cards and booze and came up with a plan to rape and murder that little girl."

The case has outraged Iraqis and led Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to call for a review of foreign troops' immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law.

The article 32 hearing -- the military equivalent of a grand jury -- heard earlier how troops were "driven nuts" by combat stress and how one of the accused burned a puppy.

Private First Class Justic Cross described how conditions "pretty much crushed the platoon", which lived in constant fear of being killed in the Mahmudiya area south of Baghdad where the rape and murders took place in March.

"It drives you nuts. You feel like every step you might get blown up. You just hit a point where you're like, 'If I die today, I die'. You're just walking a death walk," he said.

On Monday, the court at a U.S. base known as Camp Liberty heard graphic testimony of how three of the soldiers took turns raping 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi before murdering her and her family.

"TRIANGLE OF DEATH"

Mahmudiya is part of what Iraqis call the "Triangle of Death" because of frequent attacks by insurgents.

Private First Class Jesse Spielman, 21, Specialist James Barker, 23, Sergeant Paul Cortez, 23, and Private First Class Bryan Howard, 19, face charges of rape and murder among others.

If court-martialled after the Article 32 hearing and found guilty, they could face the death penalty. The hearing began on Sunday and is expected to last several days.

Private Steven Green, 21, faces the same charges in a U.S. federal court in Kentucky, home of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, his former unit. Green, who has pleaded not guilty, was discharged from the army for a "personality disorder".

Asked by a defense attorney if it was possible Green committed the rape and murders on his own, Cross said: "Green does nothing by himself."

Staff Sergeant Eric Lauzier, squad leader for the accused soldiers, said Green often said he wanted to kill Iraqis.

During the testimony, soldiers spoke of how Green threw a puppy off the roof of a building and then set it on fire.

Captain John Goodwin, the company commander, said Green was a "troubled soldier" who had "some serious anger issues".

Cross told the hearing how soldiers took Iraqi cough syrup which "makes you feel high" to relieve stress. "Everybody was very depressed. It was (an) outlet to release," he said.

An Iraqi army medic told the hearing on Sunday he entered the Iraqi family's house and found the body of the girl naked and burned from the waist up, with a single bullet wound beneath her left eye.

A fifth soldier, Sergeant Anthony Yribe, is charged with dereliction of duty and making a false statement.

"She was young and attractive. They knew where she was because they had seen her on a previous patrol. She was close. She was vulnerable," said Pickands.

David Sheldon, a civilian lawyer for Barker, focused on Green in his closing argument.

"When you put an individual like that in a stressful situation, he becomes a canister of gas waiting to explode," said Sheldon. "There was no meeting of the minds. That was a plan that Green executed and the soldiers are not responsible."

The hearing was adjourned.<div align="right">
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<img border="2" src="http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2006/07/04/ba_addition_iraq_us.jpg" width="348" height="420"></td></tr><tr><td>
U.S. Marshalls escort former Army Pvt. Steven D. Green from the federal courthouse </td></tr>
</table></div>

gene cisco · Aug 18, 2006

See that little shit green??? Type muthafucka come back here and become a cop and terrorize the neighborhood.

Somewhere, at any given time in a minority neighborhood there are some black folks or hispanics getting some fucked up treatment by 'couldnt be career military turned pig' tough guys.

I hope they weed more of the fuckers out, not just for the iraqis sake but ours and our childrens.

This like the rodney king beating. Iraqis been complaining bout this since the invasion, just so happens they decided to catch somebody, feel for the thousands of iraqis that haven't got justice.

19 years old. 21 years old. 23 years old. Very few people that age our wise enough to make good choices, and putting them in this situation is asking for trouble.

They should be coming home from school or work and getting on the 360 and drinking a cold one. Truthfully the special forces are the only one mentally tough enough not to snap, although they still do.

Oh well, hope green likes the bootie house, maybe somebody else might be doing some rape.

Go ahead bush, send some more tough guys fresh out of high school that were probaly bullies or the bullied and see what other treacherous shit they can do. All that training goes out the window as soon as that first REAL BuLLET flies past them.

Better yet go snatch that poor reserve bastard managing the pizza hut and send him. Then we wonder bout kids getting killed at checkpoints.

In this war unlike others the amount of negligent killing is high as fuck. Scary pizza managers manning checkpoints.

Then we have the blatant shit. Put together with sectarian violence and iraqis should be put on the endangered species list.

Tip of the iceburg on crimes done by our troops.

QueEx · Aug 18, 2006

Couple of points:

-- Green is a piece of shit and, unfortunately, there are other pieces of shit like him, some not yet discovered. The Green's of the world have served in every war in the army of every country. No excuse. Just fact. Doesn't make it right.

-- Green's conduct does not take away from the overwhelming majority of soldiers, young and old, who manage to handle tough situations, despite the conditions. Obviously, however, it does put a cloud over the good ones because people will focus on the bad overlooking the rest.

-- "Sectarian Violence" ... LOL, you slippin geno.

QueEx

gene cisco · Aug 18, 2006

slippin, let me get my feet under me.

Another point. Where are all the black soldiers doing this shit? Guess we aint prone to crime as the prison stats show us over here.

No doubt past generations of soldiers were tough, our culture wasn't as feminine and politically correct.

Now we are sending xbox live warriors who were just in band and poor reservists who were just trying to get extra money.

Most the white boys forced to join the army aint good enough athletes to get scholarships so you still getting riff raff.

They think this shit is ghost recon til they see the body parts.

I heard to many horror stories to believe the majority are acting cool and collective.

Anyway all I'm seeing from the first prison incident to this is white soldiers doing war crimes.

Think the drug use amoungst vietnam vets were bad check these cats 10 years from now. Yeah the majority are probaly getting fucked up over there to 'handle the pressure'.

I would say the reason minorities aint doing as much dirt is most who join are from disadvantaged area. Gunshots aint new to them. They probaly been harassed by the porkers so they know what that's like. They been watching their backs all their life.

Throw them in there with the xbox live soldiers who never heard a gunshot before joining unless it was hunting a deer. Who you think cracks first and is most likely to do this kinda dumb shit?

When I get off this MDA sunday I get my high speed together I can easily find tons of incidents iraqis are bitching bout with these calm under pressure soldiers.

Aint their suicide rate pretty dam high also?

I don't buy it. You can't turn a 18,19,20 year old punk into a competent boxer or wrestler in 3 months but you would trust them in war?

The seals and other special forces or some mentally tough and physically tough mofos, all others its a toss up.

Yeah I know soldiers did it all through history but they were supposed to. Go ahead and rape and plunder. This is supposed to be an occupation to help the people they better act like it.

Hell the italians still pissed for their cats getting blazed on accident.

Hell I would hate to see the friendly fire coverups. Calm under pressure don't make as many mistakes as these xbox live and pizz manager noobs.

Pregnant lady killed,little boy, muthafuckas stipped searched in their own homes AND smacked around on a regular basis.

Of course if the AMERICAN media reports all the incidents they could never cover the missing blonde chicks or change the code to red.

Do you believe there are a lot of right wing americans on the radio believe these incidents are made up and troops do no wrong.

They should check other news sources and see some of the pics.

QueEx · Aug 18, 2006

Slipping -- as in "Sectarian Violence" as opposed to the "Resistance". Recall, we had that discussion a day or so ago. You said, I believe, the major cause of the violence in Iraq is the Resistance - Iraqis fighting against U.S. occupation. I was suprised that you used the term Sectarian Violence (hence, slippin) since that term tends to mean violence based on their religious differences -- not resisting the U.S.

At any rate, you're right in so far as there being too many mistakes made by idiots, especially in this particular war since "winning hearts and minds" was/is as important as anything else. But you're going to have to show me some real statistics that show, as you're insinuating, that most of the approximate 500,000 troops that have served in Afghanistan and Iraq are ... merely criminals.

QueEx

neo_cacos · Aug 19, 2006

WOW... surprise ...surprise...
an army of white boys killing people of a different race, raping...etc in a foreign land.

Why do I have that deja vu feeling....HMMMM...

http://maafa.org/
LOOK AT THE PICS...(in case some of you have forgotten what the white men is capable of...or if we think they have evolved on that aspect, we're sadly mistaken.)

i) they virtually exterminated the indians
ii) they tried with us (but GOD made us STRONG)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3565938.stm
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html

iii) the arabs are next in line.

neo_cacos

QueEx · Sep 2, 2006

<center>Death Penalty Recommended in Iraq Raid</center>

Sep 2, 6:34 PM (ET)
Associated Press
By ALICIA A. CALDWELL

An Army investigator has recommended that four soldiers accused of murder in a raid in Iraq should face the death penalty if convicted, according to a report obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.

Lt. Col. James P. Daniel Jr. concluded that the slayings were premeditated and warranted the death sentence based on evidence he heard at an August hearing. The case will now be forwarded to Army officials, who will decide whether Daniel's recommendation should be followed.

The soldiers, all from the Fort Campbell, Ky.-based 101st Airborne Division's 187th Infantry Regiment, are accused of killing three Iraqi men taken from a house May 9 on a marshy island outside Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Pfc. Corey R. Clagett and Spc. Juston R. Graber have claimed they were ordered to "kill all military age males" during the raid on the island. According to statements from some of the soldiers, they were told the target was an al-Qaida training camp.

Hunsaker told investigators that he and Clagett were attacked by the three men, who were being handcuffed, and shot them in self-defense. Clagett said he was hit in the face, and Hunsaker claimed he was stabbed during the attack.

Prosecutors argue the soldiers conspired to kill the men and then altered the scene to fit their story. They contend Girouard stabbed Hunsaker as part of the killing plot.

Clagett, Girouard and Hunsaker also are accused of threatening to kill another soldier who witnessed the slayings. Girouard, the most senior soldier charged, faces several additional charges, including sexual harassment and carrying a personal weapon on duty.

Paul Bergrin, Clagett's civilian attorney, said he was surprised that Daniel recommended the case be taken to trial at all.

"I'm extremely disappointed and disheartened," Bergrin said Saturday. "They are being used as pawns in the war on terror. They followed the rules of engagement. They were confronted with violence by a known al-Qaida training camp member."

Other lawyers in the case, several of whom are deployed to Iraq, did not immediately respond to e-mail requests for comment.

The soldiers are expected to be tried at Fort Campbell. They have been jailed in Kuwait since their arrests this year.

The U.S. military has not executed a soldier since the 1960 hanging of a soldier convicted rape and attempted murder.

---

Associated Press writer Alicia A. Caldwell, the El Paso, Texas, correspondent, reported this story from Glendale, Ariz.

http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20060902/D8JT0DQ00.html

master-ceo · Sep 2, 2006

I remember a muslim dude told me back in 2002, "As long as thier are true muslims in Iraq(middle east), their will never be paece as long as the US is still there". I see now that he was right.

So we gonna have 52,000 extra crazy and crazy lookin motherfukers amongst us huh. Thank You George!

muckraker10021 · Sep 17, 2006

<img src="http://image.guardian.co.uk/sitelogos/Guardian.gif"><img src="http://image.guardian.co.uk/siteheaders/Guardian.gif">


Inside Baghdad :
Last Battle of a Stricken City

For two weeks Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor, has traveled across Baghdad with the US military. In this remarkable dispatch he describes a desperate struggle to stop a brutal sectarian conflict from ripping the city apart 
<img src="http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2003/09/03/Beaumont256.jpg">
Peter Beaumont


<h3>Sunday September 17, 2006</h3> - The Observer

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1874375,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

Karima Mohammed's men were taken on 5 September. Her husband Saleh Ahmed Mahmoud, 50, and 17-year-old son, Ghazan Saleh Ahmed, were seized by men wearing the uniform of the Iraqi police near the filling station in Zafaraniya in southern Baghdad. The day after they disappeared, her husband's brother received a threatening phone call. He would not tell Karima what the caller said, only that it was 'sectarian' in nature. Since then she has heard nothing. <div align="left">
<img src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/060228/060228_iraqboom_hmed_3a.hmedium.jpg" align="left"></div>Karima now fears the worst. It would be hard not to - between Wednesday and Friday more than 130 bodies were found, dumped on the dusty streets, the fetid rubbish tips, and floating in the sewers and rivers of the capital. Yesterday morning there were a further 47 corpses. Those killed by sectarian violence now far outnumber Iraqis being killed by suicide car bombs and insurgent attacks - more than 50 have died that way in the city in the past 72 hours.

Karima is a Sunni and her misfortune is to live in a largely Shia area - a stronghold of the Jaish al-Mahdi, the militia of the firebrand preacher Moqtada al-Sadr, a group implicated in the campaign of attacks against Sunni families across Baghdad. In Zafaraniya, bombs have been thrown at Sunni houses. A Sunni mosque has come under attack. People, like Karima's husband and son, have simply disappeared.

Surrounded by her remaining children in the courtyard of her modest home, Karima bursts into tears. 'I am so scared. We don't have any news of them. We can't sleep at night we are so terrified. We are so poor. My family relies on my husband and my son for their wages to live on.' The soldiers of Bravo Battery of the 4-320th Artillery of the US 101st Airborne Division, who came to Zafaraniya on Friday to follow up abduction cases involving Sunnis in the area, are shocked by Karima's plight. They empty their Humvees of anything they can find to help her and her children.

What is happening in Zafaraniya is not unique in the capital. Sunni families in largely Shia neighbourhoods, and Shia families in majority Sunni areas, are being driven out of their homes in the rapidly worsening campaign of sectarian violence and intimidation.

Inspired by Islamic history, a plan for a ditch around Baghdad was announced on Friday to try to stem the flow of weapons being smuggled into the capital. 'Trenches will be dug in the coming weeks,' the Interior Ministry spokesman, Brigadier Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, said. 'They will surround Baghdad.' Khalaf said the plan would restrict vehicle and pedestrian traffic to 28 guarded entry points. The idea was inspired by the Battle of Khandaq in AD627, when Prophet Muhammad protected the city of Medina from an army by digging trenches.
<div align="right">
<img src="http://lmno4p.org/images/war/26baghdad_civilians.jpg" align="right"></div>
It may take more to protect the city of Baghdad. From Adhamiya in the north, through the giant teeming Shia slum of Sadr City, to Zafaraniya in the south, a slow boiling but malevolent ethnic cleansing campaign is separating two communities that once lived side by side. In the middle are the US forces. Targeted daily by both Shia and Sunni extremists resisting the occupation, they now find themselves trying to protect each community from the other, even as they fend off the lethal attacks on themselves. Round it goes: the bomb and the bullet. A Sunni car bomb kills Shias at the mosque or at the market. Angry, the Shia death squads abduct and slaughter any Sunnis they can find, who retaliate with more car bombs. And on, and on, all in the name of 'community protection'.

It is not quite civil war. Not yet. It is ugly enough, but it lacks the speed and the intensity. Instead, it is a vicious and slow motion three-way fight in which each act is magnified by the spiralling events. Two weeks ago the trigger was in Zafaraniya, a semi-rural area on the outskirts of Baghdad squeezed between the Diyala and the Tigris rivers, surrounded by fields, dense areas of reeds, and towering groves of date palms. Then, Shia pilgrims marching to the shrine at Khadamiya, including a number of Jaish al-Mahdi militia, attacked the scruffy little Sunni Rashid mosque. In the ensuing fighting between mosque guards and the militia, the men of the 320th were forced between the two factions - which on the Jaish al-Mahdi side included members of the local police commando - to try to stop the fighting.

As the violence and threats have intensified in Zafaraniya, more families are fleeing. A week ago it was the turn of Jamal Yousef Mahmoud and his family, who left for Samarra after a bomb was thrown outside his house in the early hours. And some of those Sunnis who remain in Zafaraniya have taken to desperate measures. Like Shakrya Hassan, whose 26-year-old son Falah was taken at the same time as Karima's. Her family, though Sunni, has placed pictures of the venerated figures of the Shia sect of Islam on their walls in the hope no one will ask precisely how they pray.

Zafaraniya is a case study in the crisis facing Iraq. Its largest mosque, a huge green dome and sandy minaret that overlooks the highway, was once Sunni. Now it has been taken over by the militia of the Jaish al-Mahdi, becoming their second biggest base for operations outside Sadr City.

The Jaish al-Mahdi has infiltrated the local police, some of whose officers are blamed for the violence against Sunnis. The militia too controls the filling station and the trade in the propane gas canisters used for cooking. Even 10 Shia families have been driven out by the Mahdi militia when it took over a neighbourhood close to a veterans' hospital to use as a base for their 'reprisal' operations. And the money the Mahdi militia businesses raise, from the transportation of construction materials to protection rackets and cell phone shops, is fuelling Baghdad's dirty war.

Colonel Hussein Muhsin Bahar knows how dirty. Two of his Sunni soldiers were murdered recently along with other members of their families - one group ambushed on the way to fetch the body of one of the soldiers from the city morgue. The Mahdi militia is suspected.

Hussein, the battalion commander with the Iraqi army's only unit in Sadr City, the Jaish al-Mahdi's main base, adds that the group has also sent him death threats and tried to kidnap his son. It is not because of his religion. Hussein is a Shia in command of a largely Shia battalion whose homes are in Sadr City. It is because they see him as a threat. 'They would send me text messages saying "we'll cut off your head",' he said in his battalion headquarters. 'They would send anonymous letters too. At other times the message would come through an intermediary - a warning that said: "Look out the Mahdi Militia is planning to kill you".' Hussein has 700 soldiers under his command, a tiny number for an area whose population numbers more than two million. The Mahdi militia has at least 2,000 card-carrying members and 10 times as many active supporters.

'It is not just me who has been threatened,' says Hussein. 'It is my officers too. But everyone knows the threat comes from the Mahdi militia. They are gangsters. They are behind murders and kidnappings. But at this time they are the strongest force in Sadr City. They don't want to see any challenge. So they intimidate, they threaten to kill. They try to push us away from here.'

Hussein tells a story to illustrate the pressure on his men. 'They started a fight with some of my men at a checkpoint and when an American patrol came it arrested them and took away their weapons. When they were released they came to one of my NCOs and demanded he return the weapons or pay them four million dinars [£1,500] for the loss and for the insult. Otherwise they said they would kill him.'

And while Hussein is robust, it is clear that many of his men, most of whom live inside Sadr City, are intimidated by the group almost to the point of passivity. In the past 10 months they have done little but man checkpoints on the perimeter of Sadr City. In one incident last week, suspected members of the group threw a grenade at one of Hussein's checkpoints. When it failed to explode, the militia members reversed back to the checkpoint as the soldiers watched, got out of the car, and picked it up without a shot being fired.

As the Jaish al-Mahdi, and its parent Sadr Office, grows in strength on the ground, it has presented the Iraqi government and their US allies with a poisonous conundrum. Unable to confront and disarm them by force, a tactic that has failed before when US troops ran running battles with the Jaish al-Mahdi, the government of Nouri al-Maliki and the multinational forces has been forced into an agreement with the Sadrists that no aggressive operations will be conducted on the ground against them. Instead both parties have opted for a policy of political engagement with the group, a policy, some US and Iraqi officers fear, that is in danger of creating a huge safe haven for the Jaish al-Mahdi inside Sadr City.

'The three-way agreement over Sadr City has created a sanctuary,' said a US officer familiar with the issues. 'There has been an attempt to try to separate the idea of the Sadr Office, the political wing if you like, and the Jaish al-Mahdi, the militia. But the two are completely intertwined. Having created a loophole, we have allowed them to pursue their own interests which means murders, bodies and a lot of sectarian strife which most ordinary Shia in Sadr City don't support.' It is a view endorsed by Hussein. 'They have been given a lot of political space. And they are using it and getting stronger.'

As the Jaish-al Mahdi has grown in strength and confidence, so has the bloodletting. Nowhere is that more visible than in the area of Adhamiya, to the north and west of Sadr City. Separated into halves - one largely Sunni, the other Shia, along the Army Canal - Adhamiya has been the focus in recent weeks of a massive effort by Iraqi and US forces to clear out extremists of both sectarian persuasions - Operation Forward Together - and launch the latest effort to improve the quality of life for the residents there.

While the murder rate in Adhamiya has dropped, it has done so at the cost of US casualties, amid an aggressive sniping campaign against American soldiers. Last week, a civil affairs captain was shot in the hip after going to the aid of a group of Iraqi contractors who had been ambushed and pistol whipped. The success or failure of that operation will be a critical test of whether the further slide towards a wider conflict can be halted.

In Adhamiya's district council offices, on the Sunni side of the canal, the challenges could not be more dramatic. According to the council chairman, Sheikh Hassan Sabri Salman, an imam at one of the local Sunni mosques, 450 families on both sides have been forced out of their homes and across the canal since the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February.

'There are fanatics on both sides,' he says. 'The royal cemetery here [the Sunni graveyard] is full of dead bodies killed by the Shia, while the Sunni fanatics have killed many Shia in their turn. They have killed neighbours, employees, even women. We have persuaded the major mosques to sign a statement renouncing violence - but Jihadis and the al-Tawhid on the Sunni side, and the Mahdi militia on the Shia side, do not agree. And if we are talking about the Mahdi militia they are just gangsters who refuse to listen to their religious leaders and instead push people from their houses. Those who are pushing people from their homes on both sides are also stealing. They take their houses, their televisions and their furniture.' Sheikh Hassan describes a family who arrived at his office that morning who had been driven out by the Mahdi militia. Their children, he says, were killed in front of them.
<div align="left"><img src="http://lmno4p.org/images/war/3.28_keening.jpg" align="left"></div>
The conflict between the Sunnis and Shias in eastern Baghdad has spawned an intense political struggle over the reigns of local government. With opposing members unable or unwilling to meet at the Adhamiya district council, Shia councillors have begun demanding their own separate council controlling the majority Shia Shaab area that adjoins Sadr City in the east. In Sadr City itself, the district council has been attempting to separate itself from Baghdad's city council to form its own political alliances with other Shia majority councils and draw up their own Shia-vision for Baghdad. The consequences if carried through point towards the gradual creation of ghettoes organised and administered along sectarian lines.

One US military intelligence officer with an interest in the Jaish al-Mahdi and the Sadr Office, said: 'Certain parts are now operating like old-fashioned mobs. In the last year or so power has been given to certain individuals. They have created their own small armies which have gained power by controlling rackets around petrol stations, and thefts from people they kidnap and kill. What we have started to notice is that Moqtada al-Sadr, who is now based in Najaf, is having difficulty controlling these people who derive their power from his name. It has forced people to reassess what the Jaish al-Mahdi really is.'

It is a recognition, in large part, that has persuaded the US and Iraqi government that the way to tackle the Mahdi militia violence is not through military operations but policing, and an extra 5,000 Iraqi policemen are to join the 2,000 already deployed in Sadr City. US officers, aware of the history of massive infiltration of the Iraqi police, and its implication in death squad activities, admit it is a gamble that could backfire by arming and equipping thousands more gunmen but believe it is a risk worth taking.

For now, however, it is no comfort for those on either side of the sectarian divide, forced out of their homes. No comfort for the families of the missing and the dead. No comfort for Karima

African Herbsman · Sep 21, 2006

Good job Bush adminstration. Iraq is worse than it was under Sadaam.

Is this war worth all the unintended/intended consequences?

U.N. expert: Iraq torture may be worse

By ELIANE ENGELER, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 26 minutes ago

GENEVA - Torture in
Iraq may be worse now than it was under
Saddam Hussein, with militias, terrorist groups and government forces disregarding rules on the humane treatment of prisoners, the U.N. anti-torture chief said Thursday.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator on torture, made the remarks as he was presenting a report on detainee conditions at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay as well as to brief the U.N. Human Rights Council, the global body's top rights watchdog, on torture worldwide.

Reports from Iraq indicate that torture "is totally out of hand," he said. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."

Nowak added, "That means something, because the torture methods applied under Saddam Hussein were the worst you could imagine."

Some allegations of torture were undoubtedly credible, with government forces among the perpetrators, he said, citing "very serious allegations of torture within the official Iraqi detention centers."

"You have terrorist groups, you have the military, you have police, you have these militias. There are so many people who are actually abducted, seriously tortured and finally killed," Nowak told reporters at the U.N.'s European headquarters.

"It's not just torture by the government. There are much more brutal methods of torture you'll find by private militias," he said.

A report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq's Human Rights office cited worrying evidence of torture, unlawful detentions, growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in "honor killings" of women.

Iraq's government, set up in 2006, is "currently facing a generalized breakdown of law and order which presents a serious challenge to the institutions of Iraq" such as police and security forces and the legal system, the U.N. report said, noting that torture was a major concern.

Nowak has yet to make an official visit to Iraq and said such a mission would be unfeasible as long as the security situation there remains perilous. He based his comments on interviews with people during a visit to Amman, Jordan, and other sources.

"You find these bodies with very heavy and very serious torture marks," he said. "Many of these allegations, I have no doubt that they are credible."

According to the U.N. report, the number of Iraqi civilians killed in July and August hit 6,599, a record-high that is far greater than initial estimates suggested, the U.N. report said Wednesday.

It attributed many of the deaths to rising sectarian tensions that have pushed Iraq toward civil war.

___

Associated Press writers Bradley S. Klapper in Geneva and Nick Wadhams at the
United Nations contributed to this report.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060921/ap_on_re_mi_ea/un_iraq_torture

muckraker10021 · Oct 5, 2006

Statistics (as of September 9th 2006) compiled by 'The McLaughlin Group' © www.mclaughlin.com
<table border="4" width="550" id="table2" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td width="329" align="center">U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides</td><td align="center">  2,662</td></tr>
<tr><td width="329" align="center"> U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, </td><td align="center">63,500</td></tr><tr>
<td width="329" align="center">Iraqi civilians dead</td><td align="center">130,890</td></tr></table>

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Baghdad Hospitals Are Killing Zones
Intelligence Seen By CBS News Says
Hospitals Are Command Centers For Shiite Militia


(CBS News) - October 5th 2006, BAGHDAD

An assembly line of rotting corpses lined up for burial at Sandy Desert Cemetery is what civil war in Iraq looks like close up.

The bodies are only a fraction of the unidentified bodies sent from Baghdad every few days for mass burial in the southern Shiite city of Kerbala, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports.

They come from the main morgue that's overflowing, relatives too terrified to claim their dead because most are from Iraq's Sunni minority, murdered by Shiite death squads.

And the morgue itself is believed to be controlled by the same Shiite militia blamed for many of the killings: the Mahdi Army, founded and led by anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The takeover began after the last election in December when Sadr's political faction was given control of the Ministry of Health. The U.S. military has documented how Sadr's Mahdi Army has turned morgues and hospitals into places where death squads operate freely.

The chilling details are spelled out in an intelligence report seen by CBS News. Among some of the details of the report are:

• Hospitals have become command and control centers for the Mahdi Army militia.

• Sunni patients are being murdered; some are dragged from their beds.

• The militia is keeping hostages inside some hospitals, where they are tortured and executed.

They're using ambulances to transport hostages and illegal weapons, and even to help their fighters escape from U.S. forces.

Iraq's Health Minister, Ali al-Shameri, is a devoted follower of Moqtada al-Sadr. He disputes the report's claims.

"I am ready now, and in the future, to receive investigation teams and journalists to get into any place they want and see whether the Madhi Army are there or not," the Health Minister says. "They will find only doctors, nurses, pharmacy staff and labs and they would find nothing else."

But a hospital worker says Mahdi Army spies are everywhere, and would only talk with both face and voice masked.

"A man was bringing his murdered brother to the morgue. They asked him if he knew who the killers were and he said 'yes.' They shot him right there," she says.

More than 80 percent of the original doctors and staff where she works are gone, replaced by Shia supporters of the Mahdi Army.

"It's going to get worse because there is no control and no accountability," the hospital worker adds. "No one can stop them. They are terrified... No one will be safe. There will be destruction. Complete destruction is what we are watching with our own eyes and it's getting worse."

In burial, the victims of Iraq's sectarian slaughter still have no names, only a number on an anonymous grave marker. And with neither the Iraqi government nor the U.S. willing to act, the numbers keep climbing.

http://cbs4boston.com/topstories/topstories_story_277195952.html

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GET YOU HOT · Oct 8, 2006

Baghdad police unit scrapped for helping death squads
From James Hider, of The Times, in Baghdad

An entire police brigade in Baghdad has been suspended and its commander placed under arrest on charges of aiding sectarian death squads that have carried out mass kidnappings, it emerged today.

The Eighth Brigade of the 2nd National Police Battalion, created to keep order in western Baghdad, was de-mobilised a day after armed men in uniform herded off 14 shopkeepers from central Baghdad, and two days after 24 workers were abducted from a meat processing plant in the capital.

"The brigade’s past performance does not demonstrate the level of professionalism sought by the ministry of the interior," Major General William Caldwell, of the US military, said.

"It was realised that removing them from Baghdad would, in fact, enhance security." The brigade has more than 800 officers in uniform.

"There was clear evidence that there was some complicity in allowing death squad elements to move freely, when in fact they were supposed to be impeding their movement," General Caldwell said.

"The forces in the unit have not put their full allegiance to the government of Iraq and gave their allegiance to others," he added.

Sunni leaders have for months accused police units of helping Shia death squads carry out a series of massive kidnappings, which have included the abduction of the entire US-Iraqi Chamber of Commerce, several groups of factory workers and the Iraqi Olympic Committee.

They have charged that the police forces are hopelessly infiltrated by members of Shia militias who have killed scores of innocent people.

Brigadier Abdel Karim Khalaf, an interior ministry spokesman, said the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Eighth Brigade had been detained and was being questioned, while rank-and-file policemen were being investigated at random.

The charges of complicity in the sectarian war that has crippled the capital was a further admission by the Shia-led government that its own security forces are partly responsible for the incessant violence plaguing Baghdad.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, announced yesterday a four-point plan that included the establishment of neighbourhood committees who would be able to report on suspicious activities by the security forces and local militias.

The disgraced brigade will be sent for re-training by American forces, although one US trainer said the training programme had been scheduled months ago as part of a sweeping overhaul of Iraq’s police forces, who were hastily recruited after the 2003 invasion and which have frequently proved inadequate to the task of eradicating violence.

In late 2004, almost the entire police force in the northern city of Mosul fled their bases when insurgents attacked, while Shia policemen in Najaf joined rebels from the Mahdi Army militia and gave them their weapons when they took over the shrine city earlier that year.

Since those major setbacks, US forces have been re-training the Iraqi police, but the programme has had little impact.

A survivor of Monday’s mass kidnapping in a parade of computer shops near Baghdad’s Technology University described how half a dozen vehicles, with official security forces markings on them, pulled up and men in military fatigues rounded up all the Sunnis in the shops. They drove off with 14 people but stopped two shops short of his establishment, he said.

The bodies of several of those abducted from a meat processing plant on Sunday later showing signs of torture. Hundreds of Sunni residents from the area later demonstrated near the factory carrying banners that read "Get police troops out of our area."

muckraker10021 · Nov 14, 2006

IT'S OVER!!
There will be no "Mission Accomplished" US Victory.
The White House is even scrubbing their own website
Watch the video below
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Nir Rosen in the long article below, that is worth reading, gives the sobering details of the fiasco the Neo-Cons have brought onto America. Nobel-Prize winners estimate that the total cost to taxpayers for this fiasco will be over 2 TRILLION dollars. Now that Papa Bush's gang is taking over from the failed baby bush, we'll see what they can salvage.

Read:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15674912/site/newsweek/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15675316/site/newsweek/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15717408/site/newsweek/
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READ-NIR ROSEN's article:
http://bostonreview.net/rosen-anatomy-civil-war



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muckraker10021 · Jan 14, 2007

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Iraq's Woes Add Risks to Childbirth 
Violence and curfews are curtailing services
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by Nancy Trejos

The Washington Post
Jan. 4, 2007

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/03/AR2007010301666_pf.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Noor Ibrahim lay shivering underneath two blankets on a bed at al-Jarrah Hospital. Steps away was a red plastic bassinet. It was empty.

A few doors down, her recently born son lay wrapped in a pink blanket. He was a chubby boy of nearly nine pounds with a big patch of black hair. His eyes were closed, his head cocked to the left, his mouth slightly open, his skin soft and pale.

The boy was not in a bassinet. He was in a cardboard box. He was not heading to his mother's room. He was heading to the morgue.

"Fresh death," Ibrahim's obstetrician said as she reached into the box and lifted the boy's limp right arm, still covered in blood and amniotic fluid.

Giving birth is painful enough as it is. In war-torn Iraq, it's also becoming more dangerous.
Spontaneous road closures, curfews and gun battles make even getting to the hospital a challenge for expectant mothers. Once they arrive, the women have no guarantee that they will receive adequate health care from a qualified physician.

"It's spiraling downward. It's getting worse each day," said Annees Sadik, an anesthesiologist at al-Jarrah.

Iraq once had a premier health-care system. But the trade embargo of the 1990s and now the exodus of medical professionals have made it no better than a third-world system, doctors say. Hospitals lack the equipment, drugs and medical expertise to make labor easier or to handle complications.

Women are forgoing prenatal visits to doctors as a result. Fearful of going into labor during the nighttime curfew, they are having elective Caesarean sections. Others are relying on midwives in their neighborhoods.

Doctors, especially women, have been targeted by unknown groups for kidnapping and murder. The kidnappers often appear to be motivated by money, seizing professionals because they are among the wealthiest people in Iraq. But many Iraqis also say that insurgents are waging a campaign to eliminate the people with the skills most needed to rebuild Iraq.

As is often the case in Iraq, where bombs usually kill civilians rather than their intended targets, the death of Ibrahim's son was a matter of bad timing. Her mother-in-law, Amira Saeed, told their story as Ibrahim recovered at al-Jarrah. Ibrahim would later confirm the details.

Ibrahim felt labor pains at 9 p.m. Dec. 23 at her home in Madain, a town 15 miles south of Baghdad that has become a flash point for tension between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Few ambulance crews are willing to pick up patients at night for fear of encountering death squads, militias or rogue police officers. Few doctors are willing to work at hospitals at that time for fear of kidnapping.

Ibrahim decided to bear the pain until morning rather than drive in the dark. At 3 a.m., her water broke. It was still too dark to go out. Once the sun rose, she, her husband and her mother-in-law drove to the public hospital in Madain.

When they arrived, there was no obstetrician and no anesthesiologist, Saeed recalled. A surgeon had just been kidnapped and the doctors refused to go to work. That left the nurses to deliver Ibrahim's baby.

For several hours, Ibrahim pushed. But her baby was big and she got tired. The nurses used forceps to try to pull him out. When that didn't work, they told her to go to another hospital, Saeed said.

The family decided to go to al-Jarrah, a private hospital in the Karrada district of Baghdad. The ambulance driver refused to take them into the capital, even after they offered to pay him, Saeed said.

Ibrahim, her husband and Saeed got back into their own car. They drove for 30 minutes, past several checkpoints, as Ibrahim's baby struggled to break free from her pelvis.

An exodus of doctors
One of al-Jarrah's most experienced obstetricians carries a pistol to work.

She has received three death threats. Her ultrasound machine has been stolen. She agreed to speak to a reporter only if her name were not used because, she said, she feared for her life.

"I came here to serve my people," said the Iraqi-born and London-educated doctor, who wears a purple hijab, or head covering, and green scrubs when delivering babies.

According to a December 2006 report by the Washington-based Brookings Institution, 34,000 physicians were registered in Iraq before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Since then, about 12,000 have fled and 2,000 have been killed, it said.

At al-Jarrah, two doctors have been kidnapped and killed. Two were kidnapped and released. Three have left Baghdad. Thirteen remain on staff.

"It's a campaign to drain the country," said Aviad Najeed, a surgeon at al-Jarrah. "A very, very well-organized one. We don't know who's behind it."

Sitting in their lounge, a windowless room with lockers and leather chairs, four doctors at al-Jarrah talked about the hope they had after the invasion. They recalled buying oranges and flowers to greet U.S. troops. They thought the Americans would bring the best technology and medicines.

The Iraqi health-care system was once considered one of the best in the Middle East, with the most up-to-date equipment and well-educated doctors. Iraqis could get basic health care free, and each town had at least one hospital. That changed when the U.N. Security Council imposed an embargo after Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Medical instruments and drugs used to be shipped from Germany, France, Japan and Switzerland. Now, hospitals buy cheaper supplies from Egypt, Jordan and India, the doctors said.

At al-Jarrah, staff members do not have fetal monitors, so they use a trumpetlike device held over the womb, the doctors said. The delivery room has a chair with rusted metal footrests and an examining table with a hole in the leather cushion.

The hospital has three ultrasound machines, but no one to operate them at night because administrators cannot find a qualified person to stay at the hospital during the curfew.

And when the hospital runs out of blood, which it often does, staff members have to go to Baghdad's central blood bank, located in a neighborhood with frequent shootings, too dangerous for even an ambulance to reach. What do they do when they need blood at night? "We hope for sunrise," said Sadik, the anesthesiologist.

Many private hospitals have closed, and the public hospitals are overwhelmed by victims of the many car bombings and mortar attacks that happen across the city each day, the doctors said.

"I don't know why this is happening," said Najeed, a former military doctor who wore a gray suit and speaks perfect English. "Is this a punishment?"

'They killed her baby'
Ibrahim arrived at al-Jarrah on the afternoon of Dec. 24. She was in shock with a ruptured uterus and tears in her vagina.

The obstetrician performed an emergency Caesarean section. It was too late to save the baby. Now, the doctor had to concentrate on the mother.

The baby, the obstetrician said, died because the forceps had crushed his head. Ibrahim lived but might never be able to have another child.

"Look at this disaster," the obstetrician said as she lifted the baby's head, the top of which was slightly caved in. On the right side of his forehead was a spot of blood and a dark purple bruise.

"They killed her baby," the obstetrician said. Then she wrapped him in the pink blanket and sealed the box.

Women are increasingly asking doctors to schedule elective Caesarean sections to avoid experiences such as Ibrahim's, obstetricians said.

At al-Hayat Hospital in Baghdad, doctors used to perform 160 vaginal deliveries a week, said Maysoon Abbas, an obstetrician. As of Dec. 29, they had done 59 during the entire month.

Patients increasingly plead with her to let them have Caesareans before 5 p.m. because they don't want to drive to the hospital at night.

During curfew, ambulance drivers and even police officers sometimes charge women for rides to the hospital, or refuse to take their husbands out of fear that they are suicide bombers, doctors said.

"It's a tragedy," Abbas said. "It is a tragedy."

Unable or unwilling to go to hospitals, many women are receiving inadequate prenatal care, which is contributing to birth defects, doctors said. Al-Jarrah's obstetrician said she used to see one baby a week with congenital abnormalities. Now she sees five or six.

Many women are opting to go to neighborhood midwives when it is time to deliver.

Samira Najeeb, who delivers babies in a small room with pink walls next to her kitchen in her first-floor apartment in Karrada, insists that midwives are just as capable of delivering babies as doctors, despite having less formal training. Each year, she takes a one-month refresher course, she said.

Her mother was a midwife. Her sister is a midwife. Najeeb delivered her first baby when she was 12. Now 40, she keeps a handwritten record of the 350 or so babies she has delivered.

"When there's difficulty getting to the hospital, they come to me," she said. "Now work for me is better than before."

A mother's painful plea
In Ibrahim's room at al-Jarrah, 19 hours after their ordeal began, Saeed tended to her daughter-in-law. She had been wheeled out of surgery a few minutes earlier.

Ibrahim is 20 years old. She lost her father in the Iran-Iraq war when she was 2.

She lost her brother-in-law to a kidnapper four months ago.

Saeed did not want to tell her yet that she had lost her newborn son as well.

After her father died, Ibrahim went to live with her aunt because her mother had too many children to care for. She did not go to high school or college and has never worked at a job, Saeed said. All Ibrahim ever wanted was to be a wife and a mother.

At age 16, she had her first son.

Saeed recalled that her own son, 26, Ibrahim's husband and the owner of an auto parts store, was reluctant to have a second child. Shootouts happen in broad daylight in their neighborhood. Mortar shells destroy homes. But Ibrahim was insistent. She was going to name her new son after her murdered brother-in-law.

Ibrahim moved in and out of consciousness as she recovered. Her lips quivered. She coughed. She told Saeed she was cold.

Saeed, a short, plump woman, took off her abaya and placed it on top of Ibrahim's blankets. "By the name of God, save her," she said, patting Ibrahim's curly, dark brown hair.

"Why am I here? Why am I feeling cold?" Ibrahim asked.

Saeed found a purple bathrobe and placed it on top of Ibrahim.

"My stomach hurts me," Ibrahim said.

She grew more agitated.

"What's wrong with my son?" she asked Saeed.

"Nothing is wrong with him," Saeed answered.

"Did he die?" Ibrahim asked.

"No, he didn't die. He's in the baby's room. He's very tired," Saeed said.

"I want to warm him up," Ibrahim said. "Please keep him warm."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company


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muckraker10021 · Jan 28, 2007

Read the article below carefully, it highlights the abject buffoonery of the Bush junta’s troop ‘surge’ plan. The Shiite Iraqi troops that are embedded with the US troops, will never be fully committed to engage in a 100% Bloodlust to kill their fellow county men & women. More importantly the Sunni’s have access to hundreds of millions of dollars $$$$ - and tons of weapons & explosives. Bottom line : More Death and Chaos with Americans killed in the middle.



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Baghdad Battle Cry: 'Who's Shooting At Us?'

<img src="http://img.iht.com/images/2007/01/25/web.0125baghdad550.jpg">
A fixed contingent of U.S. and Iraqi troops operating on Haifa Street in Baghdad to dislodge ever-present insurgents and militias.


January 25, 2007

by Damien Cave

BAGHDAD

In the battle for Baghdad, Haifa Street has changed hands so often that it has taken on the feel of a no man's land, the deadly space between opposing trenches.

On Wednesday, as U.S. and Iraqi troops poured in, the street showed why it is such a sensitive gauge of an urban conflict marked by front lines that melt into confusion, enemies with no clear identity and allies who disappear or do not show up at all.

In a miniature version of the troop increase that the United States hopes will secure the city, American soldiers and armored vehicles raced onto Haifa Street before dawn to dislodge Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen who have been battling for a stretch of ragged slums and mostly abandoned high rises. But as the sun rose, many of the Iraqi Army soldiers who were supposed to do the actual searches of the buildings did not arrive on time, forcing the Americans to start the job on their own.

When the Iraqi units finally did show up, it was with the air of a class outing, cheering and laughing as the Americans blew locks off doors with shotguns. As the morning wore on and the troops came under fire from all directions, another apparent flaw in this strategy became clear as empty apartments became lairs for gunmen who flitted from window to window and killed at least one U.S. soldier.

Whether the gunfire was coming from Sunni or Shiite insurgents or militia fighters or some of the Iraqi soldiers who had disappeared into the Gotham- like cityscape, no one could say.

"Who the hell is shooting at us?" shouted Sergeant 1st Class Marc Biletski, whose platoon was jammed into a small room off an alley that was being swept by a sniper's bullets. "Who's shooting at us? Do we know who they are?"

Just before the platoon tossed smoke bombs and sprinted through the alley to a more secure position, Biletski had a moment to reflect on this spot, which the U.S. Army has now fought to regain from a mysterious enemy at least three times in the past two years. "This place is a failure," he said. "Every time we come here, we have to come back."

He paused, then said, "Well, maybe not a total failure," since American troops have smashed opposition on Haifa Street each time they have come in. With that, Biletski ran through the yellow smoke and took up a new position.

The Haifa Street operation, involving Bradley Fighting Vehicles and highly mobile Stryker vehicles, will probably cause plenty of reflection by the commanders in charge of the Baghdad "surge" of more than 20,000 troops.

Just how those extra troops will be used is not yet known, but it will probably mirror at least broadly the Haifa Street strategy of working with Iraqi forces to take on groups from both sides of the Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide.

Lieutenant Colonel Avanulas Smiley of the 3d Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2d Infantry Division, said his forces were not interested in whether opposition came from bullets fired by Sunnis or by Shiites. He conceded that the cost of letting the Iraqi forces learn on the job was to add to the risk involved in the operation.

"This was an Iraqi-led effort and with that come challenges and risks," Smiley said. "It can be organized chaos."

Many of the Iraqi units that showed up late never seemed to take the task seriously, searching haphazardly, breaking dishes and rifling through personal CD collections in the apartments. Eventually the Americans realized that the Iraqis were searching no more than half of the apartments; at one point the Iraqis completely disappeared, leaving the U.S. unit working with them flabbergasted. "Where did they go?" yelled Sergeant Jeri Gillett. Another soldier suggested, "I say we just let them go and we do this ourselves."

Then the gunfire began. It would come from high rises across the street, from behind trash piles and sandbags in alleys and from so many other directions that the soldiers began to worry that the Iraqi soldiers were firing at them. Mortars started dropping from across the Tigris River, to the east, in the direction of a Shiite slum.

The only thing that was clear was that no one knew who the enemy was.

At one point the Americans were forced to jog alongside the Strykers on Haifa Street, sheltering themselves as best they could from the gunfire. The Americans finally found the Iraqis and ended up accompanying them into an extremely dangerous and exposed warren of low-slung hovels behind the high rises as gunfire rained down.

American officers tried to persuade the Iraqi soldiers to leave the slum area for better cover, but the Iraqis refused to risk crossing a lane that was being raked by machine gun fire.

In this surreal setting, about 20 American soldiers were forced at one point to pull themselves one by one up a canted tin roof by a dangling rubber hose and then shimmy along a ledge to another hut. The soldiers were stunned when a small child suddenly walked out of a darkened doorway and an old man started wheezing and crying somewhere inside.

Ultimately the group made it back to the high rises and escaped the sniper in the alley by throwing out the smoke bombs and sprinting to safety. Even though two Iraqis were struck by gunfire, many of the rest could not stop shouting and guffawing with amusement as they ran through the smoke.

One Iraqi soldier in the alley pointed his rifle at an American reporter and pulled the trigger. There was only a click: The weapon had no ammunition. The soldier laughed at his joke.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=4345616

muckraker10021 · Feb 28, 2007

Statistics (as of February 19th 2007) compiled by 'The McLaughlin Group' © www.mclaughlin.com
<table border="4" width="550" id="table2" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td width="329" align="center">U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides</td><td align="center">  3,156</td></tr>
<tr><td width="329" align="center"> U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, </td><td align="center">70,521</td></tr><tr>
<td width="329" align="center">Iraqi civilians dead</td><td align="center">167,890</td></tr><tr>
<td width="329" align="center">U.S. Taxpayers Cost</td><td align="center">$785,546,355,123.</td></tr></table>

Bush Surge Accelerates Assault on Iraq Academics

Imagine a city torn by sectarian strife. Competing death squads roam the streets; terrorists stage horrific attacks. Local authority is distrusted and weak; local populations protect the extremists in their midst, out of loyalty or fear. A bristling military occupation exacerbates tensions at every turn, while offering prime targets for bombs and snipers
<div align="right">
<img src="http://www.chris-floyd.com/images/rfu.jpg" align="right"></div>

February 20th 2007

by Chris Floyd 

One of the most curious, and ominous, aspects of life in the Bush gang's Babylonian satrapy has been the continual, unrelenting and clearly deliberate targeting of Iraq's academics, intellectuals, technicians – basically, anyone who might be capable of independent thought and action, transcending the sectarian, ethnic and tribal cliques empowered by Bush's aggression, and outside the control
of the occupiers and their sycophants as well.

The sectarians, such as the Shiite death squads enthroned by Bush, want to get rid of the intelligentsia because they stand in the way of the fundamentalists' desire to impose religious obscurantism on Iraqi society. In addition, many of the intelligentsia – though by no means all – are Sunni, owing to the prejudice in favor of Sunni advancement under the old regime. Meanwhile, certain factions of the Sunni insurgency (which contains its own religious fanatics) also target the intelligentsia in order to make the nation ungovernable under the occupation. Meanwhile, the Bush animus toward any independent thought that might challenge the murderous fantasies of the Leader is also well-known.

In other words, to be an independent thinker in Iraq, educated and capable of taking effective action in civic society – the supposed goal of the "liberation" for all Iraqis – actually makes one an avowed enemy of all the factions either deliberately empowered or inadvertantly loosed in Iraq by Bush, including the land's most powerful faction: the White House, backed up by the U.S. military, which Bush has turned into his own private militia, serving the financial, political and ideological interests of his own little clique, at the expense of the peace, prosperity and liberty of the American people.

The new "surge" ordered by Bush has only accelerated this purging of the Iraqi intelligentsia, as the Sunday Times reports. The "sovereign" Iraqi government – whose security organs are in large part scarcely distinguishable from the Shiite death squads – are using the "crackdown" to ramp up the brain drain, harassing, robbing and beating academics.

But this is to be expected. As Arthur Silber succinctly notes, no good thing can come from America's criminal enterprise in Iraq. Conceived in evil – in lies, in the lust for blood, loot and dominion – it can only breed more evil. And it will go on breeding evil, on scales large and small, for as long as it is allowed to continue. Silber's conclusion is the whole and utter truth of the matter: "We should never have been there. Get out now. Make what reparations we can. If we have any remaining sense of decency at all, that is all we can do -- and what we must do."
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<img src="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/img/global/tol-logo.gif"> 

‘Security Forces’ Rob Baghdad Academics


Hala Jaber and Ali Rifaat

February 18, 2007

WHEN Iraqi soldiers and police smashed their way into Mohammed al-Jabouri’s home on the first day of Baghdad’s latest security crackdown last week, he did not imagine they would steal the family’s life savings.

The security forces separated the men from the women and then ordered Jabouri’s wife to give them a suitcase filled with jewellery and £20,000 in cash. When she argued they threatened to shoot her. Then they destroyed the furniture and broke the windows of the cars in the garage.

“The same militiamen who used to raid our areas in the past are now conducting the security crackdown, using this as a chance to attack us further,” Jabouri said.

Later the same night, security forces raided a compound containing the homes of 110 university professors and their families. Professor Hameed al-Aathami described what happened: “They dragged us out of our beds as we slept with our wives and children, took us outside, bound our hands and blindfolded us. They beat, cursed and insulted us.”

Dr Salah Bidayat, the dean of the school of law, fired two shots from his licensed gun in the air to get the soldiers’ attention. “They caught him, lay him on the ground and proceeded to beat, kick and curse him in the most aggressive manner and when he explained we were teachers and professors they told him you are all a bunch of asses and terrorists,” Aathami said.

“They gathered all the men in the centre of the compound and proceeded to their homes, where they broke furniture, stole money, mobile telephones and jewellery as we sat outside listening to our women and children scream and cry,” he said.

“It was very hard for us to go through this. This is the security crackdown they have been bragging about. There is no such thing as a security plan; it is all an attempt to rid the country of the few remaining educated and decent people,” said Aathami, who is planning to leave Iraq as soon as he can.

Baghdad’s latest security offensive was intended to regain neighbourhoods from Shi’ite militiamen and Sunni insurgents. Many believe the advance publicity surrounding the crackdown allowed many militiamen to escape.

American and Iraqi military yesterday reported a drop in violence in Baghdad since the start of the security offensive. They attributed the success to increased troop presence but also to a decision by Sunni and Shi’ite militants to lie low. Sources close to Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army, confirmed that he had fled Iraq for Iran at dawn on February 8 with 27 senior aides.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article1400661.ece

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muckraker10021 · Apr 20, 2007

Baghdad Death Squads End Truce To Seek Revenge

<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/19/world/19iraq.600.jpg" width="700" height="350">
In the deadliest day in Baghdad since the latest American-led "Surge" for the city took effect two months ago, at least 190 people were killed in a series of bombings that tore through predominantly Shiite crowds gathered at a bus depot, on a shopping street and near a police checkpoint. Insurgents continue to demonstrate that the American led "Surge" can not bring security to Baghdad.


April 20th 2007

by Patrick Cockburn

Death squads are returning to the streets of Baghdad despite the security plan for the capital launched with great fanfare by the US two months ago.
<div align="right">
<img src="http://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/12465/1d/media.canada.com/cp/world/20070419/w041936a.jpg" align="right"></div>
As Iraqis bury the 230 people killed or found dead on Wednesday, ominous signs are appearing that the Shia militias have resumed their tit-for-tat killings. There is a sharp increase in the number of dead bodies found bearing signs of torture, with 67 corpses discovered dumped in Baghdad in the first three days of the week.

People in Baghdad, both Shia and Sunni, do not dare move bodies left lying in the rubbish outside their doors though they sometimes cover them with a blanket. One corpse was left lying for days in the centre of a main commercial street in the Sunni bastion of al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad. He was believed to be a victim of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which has been killing Sunni who belong to other guerrilla groups or are associated with the government. Local people say that US and Iraqi forces stationed in a newly renovated police station in al-Adhamiyah as part of the security plan seem unaware of what is happening around them.<div align="left">
<img src="http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2007/02/13/svBAGHDAD_narrowweb__300x450,0.jpg" align="left"></div>

Shia militiamen are likely to seek revenge for recent horrific bombings since most victims were Shia. The bomb used in the most deadly attack, which killed 127 people and wounded 148 in Sadriyah, was meticulously planned to explode just as minibuses were collecting workers who had finished work at 4pm.

As wakes for the dead were held in huge mourning tents in nearby alleys in Sadriyah, Akram Abdullah, owner of a clothing shop, said: "It's a tragedy - devastation covers the whole area. It's as if a volcano erupted here. Charred bodies are still inside the twisted cars, some cars are still covered with ashes."

The attacks are likely to speed the return of the Mehdi Army in Shia areas to provide protection. It was stood down by its leader, the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as the US-Iraqi security crackdown began on 14 February. When Iraqi army soldiers and a US patrol entered Sadriyah after the bombing they were met with jeers and stones.

The truce by the Mehdi Army militia, though never total, may now be ending because it was met with an escalation in violence by the Sunni insurgents. In a gruesome video posted on the internet a group linked to al-Qa'ida showed a masked gunman shooting 20 kidnap victims, all police or soldiers, in the back of the head. The group had demanded the freeing of all female prisoners by the government.

There was a further suicide bomb in Baghdad yesterday which killed a dozen people in the mainly Shia Karradah district 500 yards from the heavily guarded home of President Jalal Talabani. Hours later the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, arrived on an unannounced visit saying he would tell Iraqi leaders that America's commitment was not open-ended.

The US security plan has never had the political as well as the military components essential to success. It should have encouraged more Iraqi groups to enter the political process and eschew violence. In fact it has done the opposite. The US has been pushing the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to break with Mr Sadr, who has a very large following among the Shia majority.

Mr Sadr withdrew his six ministers from the government this week saying that Mr Maliki had failed to set a deadline for a US troop withdrawal. But the Sadrists are also angry that US and Iraqi government troops have arrested 800 of their men, including Sheikh Qais Khazali, one of their leaders. Mr Sadr reportedly believes the Prime Minister reneged on an agreement not to purse the Mehdi Army if it did not fight.

The soaring number of people being executed by the government since the death penalty was reintroduced in 2004 is condemned in a new report by Amnesty International. It says that 270 people are under sentence of death and more than 100 have been executed, almost all of them since the start of 2006. The report says many of them only confessed under torture.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2465943.ece

muckraker10021 · Apr 20, 2007

Baghdad Death Squads End Truce To Seek Revenge

<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/19/world/19iraq.600.jpg" width="700" height="350">
In the deadliest day in Baghdad since the latest American-led "Surge" for the city took effect two months ago, at least 190 people were killed in a series of bombings that tore through predominantly Shiite crowds gathered at a bus depot, on a shopping street and near a police checkpoint. Insurgents continue to demonstrate that the American led "Surge" can not bring security to Baghdad.


April 20th 2007

by Patrick Cockburn

Death squads are returning to the streets of Baghdad despite the security plan for the capital launched with great fanfare by the US two months ago.
<div align="right">
<img src="http://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/12465/1d/media.canada.com/cp/world/20070419/w041936a.jpg" align="right"></div>
As Iraqis bury the 230 people killed or found dead on Wednesday, ominous signs are appearing that the Shia militias have resumed their tit-for-tat killings. There is a sharp increase in the number of dead bodies found bearing signs of torture, with 67 corpses discovered dumped in Baghdad in the first three days of the week.

People in Baghdad, both Shia and Sunni, do not dare move bodies left lying in the rubbish outside their doors though they sometimes cover them with a blanket. One corpse was left lying for days in the centre of a main commercial street in the Sunni bastion of al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad. He was believed to be a victim of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which has been killing Sunni who belong to other guerrilla groups or are associated with the government. Local people say that US and Iraqi forces stationed in a newly renovated police station in al-Adhamiyah as part of the security plan seem unaware of what is happening around them.<div align="left">
<img src="http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2007/02/13/svBAGHDAD_narrowweb__300x450,0.jpg" align="left"></div>

Shia militiamen are likely to seek revenge for recent horrific bombings since most victims were Shia. The bomb used in the most deadly attack, which killed 127 people and wounded 148 in Sadriyah, was meticulously planned to explode just as minibuses were collecting workers who had finished work at 4pm.

As wakes for the dead were held in huge mourning tents in nearby alleys in Sadriyah, Akram Abdullah, owner of a clothing shop, said: "It's a tragedy - devastation covers the whole area. It's as if a volcano erupted here. Charred bodies are still inside the twisted cars, some cars are still covered with ashes."

The attacks are likely to speed the return of the Mehdi Army in Shia areas to provide protection. It was stood down by its leader, the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as the US-Iraqi security crackdown began on 14 February. When Iraqi army soldiers and a US patrol entered Sadriyah after the bombing they were met with jeers and stones.

The truce by the Mehdi Army militia, though never total, may now be ending because it was met with an escalation in violence by the Sunni insurgents. In a gruesome video posted on the internet a group linked to al-Qa'ida showed a masked gunman shooting 20 kidnap victims, all police or soldiers, in the back of the head. The group had demanded the freeing of all female prisoners by the government.

There was a further suicide bomb in Baghdad yesterday which killed a dozen people in the mainly Shia Karradah district 500 yards from the heavily guarded home of President Jalal Talabani. Hours later the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, arrived on an unannounced visit saying he would tell Iraqi leaders that America's commitment was not open-ended.

The US security plan has never had the political as well as the military components essential to success. It should have encouraged more Iraqi groups to enter the political process and eschew violence. In fact it has done the opposite. The US has been pushing the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to break with Mr Sadr, who has a very large following among the Shia majority.

Mr Sadr withdrew his six ministers from the government this week saying that Mr Maliki had failed to set a deadline for a US troop withdrawal. But the Sadrists are also angry that US and Iraqi government troops have arrested 800 of their men, including Sheikh Qais Khazali, one of their leaders. Mr Sadr reportedly believes the Prime Minister reneged on an agreement not to purse the Mehdi Army if it did not fight.

The soaring number of people being executed by the government since the death penalty was reintroduced in 2004 is condemned in a new report by Amnesty International. It says that 270 people are under sentence of death and more than 100 have been executed, almost all of them since the start of 2006. The report says many of them only confessed under torture.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2465943.ece

Death & Chaos in Baghdad

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