Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
23, 2003
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
23, 2003
Another Day in the
Bloody Death of Iraq
At
Least 10,000 Civilians Gunned Down Since the End of the War
By ROBERT FISK
Ahmed Qasm Hamed was dumped in a black sack at
the mortuary of the Yarmouk hospital last week. Taleb Neiemah
Homtoush turned up at the city morgue with three bullets in his
head. Amr Alwan Ibrahim's family brought him to the morgue five
minutes later with a bullet through his heart. Amr was to have
married his fiancee Naghem in a week's time.
There are flies around the mortuaries
and the smell of death, and up at Yarmouk they had so many bodies
the other day that I found them lying in the yard because the
fridge was already filled with corpses. On stretchers with blankets
thrown over them, on the hot concrete beneath the sun, the flies
already moving to them in the 45 degree heat. At the city morgue,
the morticians appear in dirty green overalls, scarcely glancing
at the wailing relatives by the gate, slumped in tears beside
a lake of sewage.
After a while--after hours, day after
day at the mortuaries--you get to know the victims. Their fathers
and wives and cousins tell you how they dressed, how they worked,
how many children they have left behind.
Often the children are there beside the
cheap wooden coffins, screaming and crying and numb with loss.
The families weep and they say that no one cares about them and,
after expressing our sorrow to them over and over again, I come
to the conclusion they are right. No one cares. "Al baqiya
fi hayatek," we tell them in Arabic which, roughly translated,
means "May his lost life be yours
in the future." But it is lost for ever--his life, and,
by even the most conservative estimates, those of 10,000 other
Iraqi civilians gunned down since we "liberated" Baghdad
on 9 April.
Here, for the record, are just a few
of last week's cull. Hassan Ahmed was 26. At the morgue, his
cousin Sadeq produces a photograph of the young man for me. Hassan
is smiling, he has a thin, slightly bearded face and is wearing
a bright purple shirt. His father, a soldier, was killed in the
Iran-Iraq war in 1982, when Hassan was just five years old. At
3pm last Wednesday, he was walking in the street in his home
neighbourhood of Al-Biyar in Baghdad when someone--no one knows
who or why--shot him twice in the head.
Old Sarhan Daoud is almost toothless
and bespectacled and is standing outside the doors of the Baghdad
city morgue in a long white "dishdash" robe. A few
hours earlier, his only sons, 19-year-old Ahmed and 27-year-old
Ali were gunned down outside their Baghdad home. There is talk
of a revenge killing but the father isn't certain. "We are
just trapped in this tragedy," Sarhan says. "There
were very few killings like this before. Now everyone uses guns.
Please tell about our tragedy." After half an hour, waiting
beside the pool of sewage, shoved aside as other corpses are
brought into the morgue--the coffins come from the mosques and
are re-used day after day--Ahmed and Ali are brought out in their
plywood caskets and roped to the top of a minivan into which
cousins and uncles and the old father climb for the funeral journey
to the family's home village near Baquba.
The family of Amr Ibrahim say they know
who shot the 30-year-old construction worker on Wednesday. They
even gave the name to the American-paid Iraqi police force. But
the police did nothing. "It is anarchy that we live through,"
his uncle Daher says. "Then, when we get here, they charge
us 15,000 dinars (lbs5) for the autopsy--otherwise we can't have
a death certificate. First we are robbed of life. Then they take
our money." For many in Iraq, lbs5 is a month's wages.
Twenty-six-year-old Fahad Makhtouf was
knifed to death near his home on Tuesday night. His uncle speaks
slowly. "No one cares about our tragedy. No one cares about
us."
Up at the Yarmouk, they've had a bad
week. Mortada Karim has just received the bodies of three men,
all shot dead, from local police stations. All are believed to
have been murdered by thieves. "Four days ago, we had one
of the worst cases," he says. "A mother and her child.
There had been a wedding party and people had been shooting in
the air. The Americans opened fire and the woman and her child
were hit and killed." On the same day, they received an
Iraqi man, killed by his father because they had quarrelled over
the loot they had both stolen in Baghdad.
Last month, a family of nine were brought
to the Yarmouk. The mortuary attendants believe the five women
were found by their brothers in a brothel and in the subsequent
"honour killings" their brothers were caught up in
a gun battle.
On the walls of the city mortuary, families
have for weeks left photographs of those who have simply disappeared.
"We lost Mr Abdul-emir al-Noor al-Moussawi last Wednesday,
11 June, 2003, in Baghdad," it says beneath the photograph
of a dignified man in suit and tie. "He is 71 years old.
Hair white. Wearing a grey dishdash. A reward will be paid to
anyone with information." Or there is 16-year-old Beida
Jaffer Sadr, a schoolgirl apparently kidnapped in Baghdad--her
story has already been told in The Independent--whose father's
telephone number is printed below her picture. "Blond hair,
brown eyes, wearing a black skirt," it says.
The occupation powers, the so-called
"Provisional Coalition Authority", love statistics
when they are useful. They can tell you the number of newly re-opened
schools, newly appointed doctors and the previous day's oil production
in seconds. The daily slaughter of Iraq's innocents, needless
to say, is not among their figures. So here are a few statistics.
On Wednesday of last week, the Baghdad city morgue received 19
corpses, of which 11 were victims of gunfire. The next day, the
morticians received 11 dead, of whom five had been killed by
bullets. In May, approximately 300 murder victims were brought
to the morgue, in June around 500, in July 600, last month about
700. In all of July of last year--under Saddam's regime--Dr Abdullah
Razak, the deputy head of the morgue, says that only 21 gunshot
victims were brought in.
Of course, it's possible to put a gloss
on all this. Saddam ruled through terror. If there was security
in Baghdad under his regime, there was mass murder in Kurdistan
and in the Shia south of Iraq. Tens of thousands have been found
in the mass graves of Iraq, men--and women--who had no death
certificates, no funerals, no justice. At the Abu Ghraib prison,
the head doctor, Hussain Majid--who has been reappointed by the
prison's new American guards--told me that when "security
prisoners" were hanged at night, he was ordered not to issue
death certificates.
It might be argued that under the previous
regime, the government committed the crimes. Now, the people
commit them. How can the Americans be held to account for honour
killings? But they are accountable, for it is the duty of the
occupying power to protect the people under their control. The
mandate of the CPA requires it to care for the people of Iraq.
And they don't care.
None of the above statistics take into
account the hundreds of shooting incidents in which the victims
are wounded rather than killed. In the Kindi hospital, for example,
I come across a man whose father was caretaker of a factory.
"Looters came and he opened fire on them and then the Americans
came and shot my father because he was holding his gun,"
he said. "He's had two operations, and he'll live. But no
one came to see us. No one came to say sorry. Nobody cared."
One of the most recent corpses to arrive
is that of Saad Mohamed Sultan. He was an official interpreter
for the occupying powers and was, incredibly, shot dead by an
American soldier on a convoy as he travelled with an Italian
diplomat to Mosul. After shooting him, the Americans drove calmly
on. They didn't bother to stop to find out who they'd killed.
Saad was 35. He had a wife and two children.
In the yard of the City Morgue, a group
of very angry young men have gathered. They are Shia and, I suspect,
members of the Badr Brigade. They are waiting for the coffin
of Taleb Homtoush who was killed by three bullets fired into
his head as he stood at the door of his Baghdad home on Wednesday.
Taleb had lost his legs in the Iran-Iraq war. Two of his brothers
were killed in the same conflict. Another cousin who will not
give his name, a tall man, is spitting in anger as he speaks.
"You must know something,"
he shouts at me. "We are a Muslim country and the Americans
want to create divisions among us, between Sunni and Shia. But
no civil war will occur here in Iraq. These people are dying
because the Americans let this happen. You know that the Americans
made many promises before they came here. They promised freedom
and security and democracy. We were dreaming of these promises.
Now we are just dreaming of blowing ourselves up among the Americans."
Robert Fisk is
a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to Cockburn and
St. Clair's forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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