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NEWS/ANALYSIS:

Marine confirms what Iraqis know: U.S. soldiers kill innocents, desecrate dead bodies, and steal their money Natasha Saulnier, Independent (May 23)
During 12 years in the US Marines, including three years putting new recruits through boot camp, Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey hardly questioned his role. But what he saw in Iraq changed that.
Mr Massey watched as badly injured Iraqis were repeatedly "tossed on the side of the road without calling medics". His reaction to the event that triggered the recent siege of Fallujah - the sight of the blackened, mutilated bodies of four American private security men - was that "we did the same thing to them".
Iraqis, he said, "would see us debase their dead all the time. We would be messing around with charred bodies, kicking them out of the vehicles and sticking cigarettes in their mouths. I also saw vehicles drive over them. It was our job to look into the pockets of dead Iraqis to gather intelligence. However, time and time again, I saw Marines steal gold chains, watches and wallets full of money."
U.S. wedding slaughter Justin Huggler, Independent (May 21)
Guardian account, damning testimony
photos of children killed
A tiny bundle of blankets is unwrapped; inside is the body of a baby, its limbs smeared with dried blood. Then the mourners peel back the blanket further to reveal a second dead baby.
Another blanket is opened; inside are the bodies of a mother and child. The child, six or seven years old, is lying against his or her mother, as if seeking comfort. But the child has no head.
These are the images that American forces in Iraq had no answer to yesterday. They come from video footage of the burials of 41 men, women and children. The Iraqis say they died when American planes launched air strikes on a wedding party near the Syrian border on Wednesday.
US forces insist that the attack was on a safe house used by foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria. They do not dispute that they killed about 40 people, but claim American forces were returning fire and the dead were all foreign fighters. For the video footage that shows dead women and children they have no explanation.
So potentially damaging is the video to the US occupation that American officials have demanded that the Dubai-based al-Arabiya television news network, which obtained the footage, give them the name of the cameraman who took it. Al-Arabiya has refused.
America's "war on terror" calling card:
wedding party massacres Scott Wilson and Sewell Chan, Washington Post (May 20)
Video footage from the scene showed fresh graves and the corpses of several children. A man in a red-and-white head scarf told the Associated Press Television Network: "The planes came in and shot the whole family. They kept shooting until the morning, until they destroyed all the houses. They didn't leave anything."
The body of a boy, who appeared to be 4 or 5 years old, was shown wrapped in a brown blanket, flies buzzing about his head. People around him identified him as Hamza Rikad. "Come here, help us," a man said on the video as they lifted the boy. "Take him by the hand."
Regarding Wednesday's attack, "our sense is that this was a legitimate military target," said a U.S. military official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We suspect that this was a smuggler or foreign-fighter" route, the official said. "It's our estimation right now that the personnel involved in this matter were part of the foreign-fighter safe house."
In July 2002, 48 people were killed and more than 100 others were wounded after U.S. warplanes flying over Afghanistan bombed and strafed the village of Miandao and three nearby villages in Uruzgan province during a wedding celebration. U.S. officials, while expressing condolences to the victims, said they were responding to hostile ground fire.
Many children among the dead as U.S.-financed Israeli military attacks Palestinians Chris McGreal in Rafah, Guardian (May 19)
Rafah Many Palestinians were bracing themselves for a long and bloody battle yesterday. With more than 100 tanks and armoured vehicles and thousands of troops mobilised for Operation Rainbow, the Israeli press has likened it to the army's 2002 assault on the West Bank. Operation Defensive Shield resulted in widespread destruction and death in Jenin, Nablus and other cities two years ago.
Although the Israelis have described the assault as part of the war on terror, the popular view in Rafah is that it is a reprisal for last week's killing of 13 Israeli soldiers in Gaza in attacks that severely embarrassed the military leadership and fuelled domestic opposition to the settlements.
Torture and Moral Agency -
Institutions and individuals can both be held accountable Zeynep Toufe, Under the Same Sun (May 18)
Perhaps we shy away from this deeper recognition of individual moral agency because it has such far reaching consequences. When we deny another's moral agency, we help to create the conditions for denying our own. If we start talking about individual responsibility when it comes to soldiers, how long is it before we discover our own individual responsibility when it comes to war, colonialism, disproportionate consumption, racism, ecological damage, global poverty and hunger, millions of dead children who lacked simple drugs...
The simple fact is almost all of us, even those who try to consume little and recycle everything, benefit from living in such a wealthy country. As George Orwell wrote, "certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind." The fact that one can dial 9-1-1 during a heart attack gives us 10 to 20 years advantage over the life expectancy of most of the rest of world. Even if you swear not to use it, you have the option - and I believe that, being human, you will be weaker in your resolve when your breath almost leaves you.
'There were rockets, shells. It was war. Then bulldozers destroyed everything' Chris McGreal, Guardian (May 18)
...word that Israeli tanks had sealed off Rafah was enough to stir those whose homes had survived the demolition by the army's bulldozers on Friday, which crushed about 200 houses in the name of the war on terror.
On Sunday Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's chief of army staff, said there was more destruction to come. Yesterday Mrs Qishta and hundreds of others in Rafah took him at his word.
"It's an act of terror to destroy all these homes. If you make people so afraid that they flee the homes they have built with the only money they have just to save their lives, what can you call that but an act of terror?" she asked.
Since the beginning of the intifada more than three years ago, Israel's armoured bulldozers have destroyed 1,200 houses in Rafah and, according to the UN, made more than 12,000 people homeless: one in 10 of the population.
US guards filmed beatings at Guantanamo David Rose and Gaby Hinsliff, Observer (May 16)
British military police made four arrests over allegations that British troops abused Iraqi prisoners. All four men were later released without charge, pending fur ther interviews. It is the case of Dergoul, however, that is likely to be the most damaging. The 26-year-old, from Mile End in east London, spent 22 months at Guantanamo Bay from May 2002. Today he tells The Observer of repeated assaults by Camp Delta's punishment squad, known as the Extreme Reaction Force or ERF.
Dergoul tells of one assault by a five-man ERF in shocking terms: 'They pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed.
'They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.
Planning continues for U.S. control of Iraq Rahul Mahajan, Empire Notes (May 13)
[text from today's Wall Street Journal] As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.
In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover. In many cases, these U.S. and Iraqi proxies will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens. The new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials and others familiar with the plan. [end WSJ quote]
Terrorist plot foiled! Justin Podur, En Camino (May 12)
Venezuela Some 88 Colombian paramilitaries were apprehended on Sunday May 9 at a ranch, El Hatillo, near Caracas, in Venezuela. These 88 were part of a larger group of 130 who had entered the country. According to the testimony of one of these captured Colombians, the group was training and preparing for yet another operation to overthrow the Venezuelan government.
Reactions are coming fast and furious. Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, framed the issue in explicitly anti-terrorist terms. "We've struck a blow against coup-plotters, destabilizers, and terrorists, in this endless struggle against terrorism, destabilization, and the enemies of democracy and the people." The whole operation was an assassination attempt: "They came to kill me."
He also made an important reference to the treatment of the Colombian prisoners by the Venezuelan armed forces. "There will be no torture or hooding, no sadomasochism, because our soldiers and police are not sadistic."
The United States, whose armed forces have engaged in considerable amounts of torture, hooding, and sadism, rejected any idea that this plot could have come from the US, without providing any detail. Richard Boucher, the State Department's spokesperson, said: "I know there are some accusations that all this is part of some US conspiracy to overthrow the Chavez government. We categorically reject these declarations and shameful accusations."
Americans do it in Afghanistan too Carlotta Gall, NY Times (May 12)
More than once, he said, soldiers inserted their fingers into his anus. He said one had touched his penis and asked, "Why is this unhappy?"
American soldiers would throw stones and bottles at the detainees in the cages, he said. "It was like stoning monkeys at the zoo," he said. "They brought buckets of stones and were laughing as they did it."
Jail abuse of women Luke Harding, Guardian (May 12)
Senior US military officers who escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib on Monday admitted that rape had taken place in the cellblock where 19 "high-value" male detainees are also being held.
Journalists were forbidden from talking to the women, who are kept upstairs in windowless 2.5 metre by 1.5 metre cells. The women wailed and shouted.
They were kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, Col Quantock said, with only a Koran.
Other allegations being investigated are that a 12- or 13-year-old girl had been stripped naked in the block and paraded in front of male inmates.
Random arrest and torture are standard practice Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Scott Wilson, Washington Post (May 11)
In a report in February, the Red Cross stated that some military intelligence officers estimated that 70 percent to 90 percent of "the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake." Of the 43,000 Iraqis who have been imprisoned at some point during the occupation, only about 600 have been referred to Iraqi authorities for prosecution, according to U.S. officials.
Ahmed Moeff Khatab, a 32-year-old plumber, said he was getting a shave in his local barbershop in Baghdad's Adhamiya neighborhood on Nov. 11 when a group of soldiers in U.S. military uniforms entered carrying AK-47s. Red-and-white scarves covered their faces, he said.
They pulled me from the shop and put me in a Nissan pickup," said Khatab, who said the men spoke English and accused him of being a member of former president Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces. "They threw me face down, then blindfolded me and handcuffed me."
He said he did not know where he was taken because the soldiers did not remove his blindfold. They started beating him with pipes, he said, starting on his legs and back, then moving to his head.
"I was bleeding from my mouth and my ears," he said. "I fainted. When I woke up I was in a dog's cage" set in a courtyard of a local military base.
Khatab said he was left naked in the cage for several days, receiving only scant food and water, until the soldiers hung him from a tree by his cuffed hands. "They told me they would bring my wife and hang her next to me," he said.
More from Seymour Hersh Seymour Hersh, New Yorker (May 9)
The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused.
Humiliating torture is worse when deluded soldiers think they're avenging 9/11 David Leigh, Guardian (May 8)
The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan "prolong the shock of capture", he said.
The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.
"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11".
Elsewhere in the empire: NATO forces feed sex slavery in Kosovo Ian Traynor, Guardian (May 7)
Western troops, policemen, and civilians are largely to blame for the rapid growth of the sex slavery industry in Kosovo over the past five years, a mushrooming trade in which hundreds of women, many of them under-age girls, are tortured, raped, abused and then criminalised, Amnesty International said yesterday.
As a result of the influx of thousands of Nato-led peacekeepers, "Kosovo soon became a major destination country for women trafficked into forced prostitution. A small-scale local market for prostitution was transformed into a large-scale industry based on trafficking, predominantly run by criminal networks."
Women were bought and sold for up to 2,000[UK] and then kept in appalling conditions as slaves by their "owners", Amnesty said. They were routinely raped "as a means of control and coercion", beaten, held at gunpoint, robbed, and kept in darkened rooms unable to go out.
Pleading prisoners and families at Abu Ghraib Luke Harding in Abu Ghraib, Guardian (May 6)
Five women inmates, meanwhile, screamed, shouted and waved their arms through the iron bars. "I've been here five months," one of the women shouted in Arabic. "I don't belong to the resistance. I have children at home."
At a tent camp inside the prison used for detainees with medical conditions, prisoners ran out shouting as the busload of journalists pulled in. Some hobbled out of tents on crutches.
A one-legged man hopped out, waving his prosthetic leg in the air. "Why! Why!" he shouted in Arabic. "Nobody has told me why I'm here."
Another prisoner held up a sign. It complained of "random capturing from the streets", "illogical questions with no relation to reality" and "mental and psychological interrogations for no obvious reasons".
The journalists were not allowed to talk to any of the inmates.
A profound racism in abuse and reactions Ahdaf Soueif, Guardian (May 5)
The media are fearful that these images will go down badly in the Arab world because "they show Muslim men being humiliated by American women". Again the not-so-subtle reduction of the Arab world to an entity that reacts only to religious prodding. Actually the photographs have confirmed people's belief that the US and Britain are not in Iraq as an act of goodwill. They have strengthened the feeling that there is a deep racism underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the third world generally.
The acts in the photos being flashed across the networks would not have taken place but for the profound racism that infects the American and British establishments. At squaddie level, Sarah Oliver reports in the Mail on Sunday that "the British soldiers loathe the dirtiness of Iraq and the native population's slothfulness, kleptomania and determination to do as little as possible for themselves".
An Iraqi family devastated by U.S. torture Dahr Jamail, New Standard News (May 5)
American soldiers detained Zoman at his residence in Kirkuk on July 21, 2003 when they raided the Zoman family home in search of weapons and, apparently, to arrest Zoman himself.
More than a month later, on August 23, US soldiers dropped Zoman off, already comatose, at a hospital in Tikrit. Although he was unable to recount his story, his body bore telltale signs of torture: what appear to be point burns on his skin, bludgeon marks on the back of his head, a badly broken thumb, electrical burns on the soles of his feet. Additionally, family members say they found whip marks across his back and more electrical burns on his genitalia.
Sadiq Zoman remains completely unresponsive. His family cares for him in a stark home nearly devoid of furnishings, situated in the Al-Dora neighborhood of Baghdad. The family moved there from Kirkuk last fall in order to facilitate better care and conditions for Zoman. The family has sold nearly everything that remained after the Army raid to purchase food and medical supplies. Entire rooms in their new Baghdad home are completely empty since nearly all their furnishings have been sold off.
CIA privatizes torture, media miss the full story Kurt Nimmo, Counterpunch (May 4)
Late last year the Sunday Times reported the CIA was actively recruiting former agents from Saddam Hussein's notorious security force, Mukhabarat. Mohammed Abdullah, who had spent 10 years in the Mukhabarat and eight in Iraqi military intelligence, told the Sunday Times he was on the CIA's payroll -- hired to hunt down members of the resistance as well as Iraqis allegedly spying for Iran and Syria. "If successfully set up, the group would work in tandem with American forces but would have its own structure and relative independence," an anonymous intelligence officer told the Times. "It could be expected to be fairly ruthless in dealing with the remnants of Saddam." It does not seem to matter to the CIA or Bush, however, that many former members of Mukhabarat remain Saddam loyalists.
Although individual soldiers are under investigation for abusing Iraqi detainees -- and Hersh names them in his article -- there is no mention of the CIA, military intelligence, or private corporations (this information was provided by Jullian Borger of the Guardian, aBritishnewspaper). As usual in such situations, lowly scapegoats will be sacrificed -- careers ruined, pensions lost -- and the real culprits will fade into the background, allowed to continue their repulsive work.
Torture at Abu Ghraib prison worse and systematic, report reveals Seymour Hersh, New Yorker (May 10 issue)
As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba's report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.
Mutiny is the only way out of Iraq's inferno Naomi Klein, Guardian (May 1)
In asking the US to serve as its bodyguard as a condition of re-entering Iraq, the UN has it exactly backwards - it should go in only if the US pulls out. Troops who participated in the invasion and occupation should be replaced with peacekeepers from neighbouring Arab states charged with making the country secure for general elections.
On April 25, the New York Times editorial board called for the opposite approach, arguing that only a major infusion of American troops and "a real long-term increase in the force in Iraq" could bring security. But these troops, if they arrive, will provide security to no one - not to the Iraqis, not to their fellow soldiers, not to the UN. American soldiers have become a direct provocation of violence, not only because of the brutality of the occupation in Iraq but also because of US support for Israel's deadly occupation of Palestinian territory. In the minds of many Iraqis, the two occupations have blended into a single anti-Arab outrage.
Fallujah Orit Shohat, Ha'aretz (Apr 28)
During the first two weeks of this month, the American army committed war crimes in Falluja on a scale unprecedented for this war. According to the relatively few media reports of what took place there, some 600 Iraqis were killed during these two weeks, among them some 450 elderly people, women and children.
Fallujah The sight of decapitated children, the rows of dead women and the shocking pictures of the soccer stadium that was turned into a temporary grave for hundreds of the slain - all were broadcast to the world only by the Al Jazeera network. During the operation in Falluja, according to the organization Doctors Without Borders, U.S. Marines even occupied the hospitals and prevented hundreds of the wounded from receiving medical treatment. Snipers fired from the rooftops at anyone who tried to approach.
The only conclusion that has been drawn thus far from the indiscriminate killing in Falluja is the expulsion of Al Jazeera from the city. Since the start of the war, the Americans have persecuted the network's journalists - not because they report lies, but because they are virtually the only ones who manage to report the truth. The Bush administration, in cooperation with the American media, is trying to hide the sights of war from the world, and particularly from American voters.
John Kerry's DLC vs. the Pirates BlackCommentator.com (Apr 22)
The Democratic Leadership Council, which now writes John Kerry's scripts, is the corporate-financed faction of the Democratic Party, conceived as a mechanism to diminish Black and labor influence and to slow the defection of southern whites to the GOP. The DLC blunts the party's ability to act as a counterweight to corporate power, domestically, and cultivates a mass base for "American" business objectives abroad. Through its role as dispenser of corporate (and corporate media) favor, the DLC wields decisive influence far beyond its membership.
After three years of Republican rule, it is madness to say that John Kerry's DLC rump of the Democratic Party is even remotely equivalent to the rampaging Bush regime. The Bush men have a plan to "change the world"; the DLC have none. The Bush men are driven by a triumphalist ideology; the DLC have their hands out. The DLC attempts to obstruct and co-opt progressive ideas and movements within the Democratic Party; the Bush men are determined to snuff out all who oppose the absolute rule of capital on the Planet Earth, the U.S. included.
The Bush administration is a unique danger to human survival. There can be no more compelling call to action than that. They have also shown themselves to be fully prepared, if not eager, to abort the process that has passed for electoral democracy in the United States - thereby definitively mooting the Tweedledum versus Tweedledee conversation.
The more vocal elements of the "no difference" crowd objectively aid the Republicans. They assist the GOP's voter suppression strategy, channeling white voters to Ralph Nader, a man with no party, and encouraging African Americans not to vote at all. (This is the real aim of GOP media campaigns targeting Blacks, which focus on white Democrats' failures and "betrayals" rather than Republican policies.)
Just as destructively, the false analysis (or non-analysis) that equates the DLC with the Bush cabal - as if they are the same people, operating on the same imperatives - discourages discussion of what Blacks and progressives face if Kerry succeeds in capturing the White House. Our job is both to defeat Bush and to prevent Kerry from taking us where he wants to go - back to the Clinton era. There must be an opposition in place in January of next year, and no honeymoon. We must anticipate the political lay of the land under a Kerry administration, and quickly move towards a strategy for dismantling as much as possible of both the George Bush and Bill Clinton legacies.
That's a mountain of work - too much for the "no difference" crowd to contemplate.
Human Rights Watch: U.S. silent on at least 10,000 Iraqi detainees Reuters (Apr 21)
[Human Rights Watch] said the U.S. Department of Defense had not responded to a Feb. 10 letter seeking information on how it had handled those cases.
Why the U.S. military targets al-Jazeera Arthur Neslen, Guardian (Apr 21)
When US forces recently demanded that a team from the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera leave Falluja as a condition for reaching a ceasefire with the local resistance, it came as no surprise at the network's headquarters in Doha. Reliable sources there say that coalition officials threatened to close down the al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad earlier this year and last week sent a letter accusing the network of violating the Geneva convention and the principles of a free press.
Since the "war on terror" began, al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of the Pentagon. "My solution is to change the channel," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said this month in Baghdad, "to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources."
Last November, George Bush declared that successful societies "limit the power of the state and the military ... and allow room for independent newspapers and broadcast media". But three days earlier, an al-Jazeera camera man, Salah Hassan, had been arrested in Iraq, held incommunicado in a chicken-coup-sized cell and forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for up to 11 hours at a time. He was beaten by US soldiers who would address him only as "al-Jazeera" or "bitch". Finally, after a month, he was dumped on a street just outside Baghdad, in the same vomit-stained red jumpsuit that he had been detained in.
John Negroponte, current UN Ambassador, next top administrator of Iraq worldhistory.com
His appointment to the UN post [U.S. ambassador to the UN, 2001 - present] was a controversial one because of his involvement in covert funding of the Contras and his covering up of human rights abuses in Honduras in the 1980s.
During his tenure [as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, 1981-1985], he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. According to The New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua."
Negroponte supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site. Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnaped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.
U.S., France blocking Haiti probe at UN Thalif Deen, IPS (Apr 14)
The United States and France have intimidated Caribbean countries into delaying an official request for a probe into the murky circumstances under which Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted from power in February, according to diplomatic sources here.
Any attempts to bring the issue or even introduce a resolution before the Security Council will either be blocked or vetoed by both countries, council sources told IPS.
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to Annan, has called on the United Nations to restore Aristide to power. To trained observers, he said last month, the events surrounding the ouster of Aristide "have the hallmarks of a U.S.-led operation against Mr. Aristide, similar to the 1991 coup against him during the administration of George HW Bush, in which the U.S. government fingerprints abounded (including thugs who subsequently acknowledged being on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency)."
Off the radar for most Americans, mounting deaths provoke anger and concern in Iraq Anne Barnar, Boston Globe (Apr 11)
Stories of mounting Iraqi casualties last week in Fallujah -- punctuated on television with images of dead children and bombed-out houses -- are fueling support for antioccupation fighters, drawing in some Iraqis who had shunned violent resistance.
"These operations were a mass punishment," Adnan Pachachi, of the Governing Council, told Al-Arabiya television. "It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal."
Despite the pains US military officials have taken to say they do not target civilians, the common perception prevails that the United States is killing civilians intentionally to take revenge for the grisly deaths of four US security contractors, who were ambushed late last month as they drove through the city, then burned and mutilated. Marines say the operation aims to root out those responsible.
US military officials do not make public enemy casualty counts and say they do not count civilian casualties. The precise number of noncombatant civilians caught in crossfire is impossible to verify. Fallujah's main hospital has reported 450 Iraqis killed since last Sunday.
Iraqis told them to go from day one Sami Ramadani, Guardian (Apr 9)
The unleashing of F16 fighter bombers, Apache helicopter gunships and "precisely" targeted bombs and tank fire on heavily populated areas is making the streets of Baghdad, Falluja and the southern cities resemble those of occupied Palestine. Sharon-style tactics and brutality are now the favoured methods of the US-led occupation forces - including the torture of prisoners, who now number well over 10,000.
There is little doubt that the resistance will spread to new areas of Baghdad and the south, with the intense anti-occupation feelings of the people turning into more militant forms of protest. The US-led invasion is daily being unmasked for what it is: a colonialist adventure being met by a resistance that will eventually turn into an unstoppable war of liberation.
What went so wrong that the US-led war to "liberate" the Iraqi people turned into the daily slaughter of the victims of Saddam's tyranny? The answer is simple: nothing has gone wrong. Despite the mythology, most Iraqis were strongly against the invasion from the start, though it has taken 12 months for the world's media to report that.
Invisible to most Americans, countless Iraqis killed, meanwhile aid is brought to Falluja, not by the occupying power, but by other beleaguered Iraqis George Wright, Guardian (Apr 8)
Taher al-Issawi, a doctor in the besieged [Falluja]'s hospital, said today that more than 280 Iraqis have been killed and 400 wounded during the offensive. He told the Associated Press there were many more dead and wounded "in various places buried under rubble" who could not be reached because of fighting.
Meanwhile, thousands of Iraqis - from both the Sunni and Shia communities - marched 60km from Baghdad to Falluja to bring food and medical supplies to the besieged citizens there.
U.S. military terrorizes poor district of Baghdad Karl Vick and Sewell Chan, Washington Post (Apr 6)
"Why do they do like this to us?" Jabbar asked.
The question was asked in a dozen different ways Monday at Chawadir Hospital, a Sadr City fixture that received 96 people wounded in the chaos that left at least 43 Iraqis dead and opened a chasm between a community and its occupiers.
At one point, U.S. fire tore into an ambulance driven by Raad Diaheer Lazem, who took a bullet in the abdomen. Rounds from a .50-caliber machine gun punctured the vehicle 100 yards from the entrance to Chawadir Hospital, killing a pregnant woman with a leg wound and the 6-year-old son riding with her to the hospital.
"The lights were on, the siren -- all the things an ambulance should use in a battle zone," Lazem said. "I don't know why they shot at me. When I left the hospital they saw me. I was shuttling patients back and forth all night."
Muntahah Shekhawer, who works in the children's ward, broke down in tears as she recalled children carried into the emergency room. "I felt so bad I couldn't save them," she said. "Two, 3 years old. All of them shot in the head. Always in the head.
[Iraqis interviewed] condemned civilian casualties, an issue near the heart of the matter for many residents. U.S. commanders, however, place it lower on their list of concerns.
"I'm more concerned about making sure that we've applied combat power wherever it happens to be applied and no place else," Dempsey said. "But we didn't start this fight and had no choice but to finish it, and we did so as carefully as we could. You've been to Sadr City. It is a densely populated place."
U.S. sabotaging Iraq Naomi Klein, Globe and Mail (Apr 5)
On Sunday, Iraqi soldiers, trained and controlled by coalition forces, opened fire on demonstrators here, forcing the emergency evacuation of the nearby Sheraton and Palestine hotels. As demonstrators returned to their homes in the poor neighbourhood of Sadr City, the U.S. army followed with tanks and helicopters. As night fell, there were unconfirmed reports of dozens of casualties. In Najaf, the day was equally bloody: 19 demonstrators dead, more than 150 injured.
But make no mistake: This is not the "civil war" that Washington has been predicting will break out between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Rather, it is a war provoked by the U.S. occupation authority and waged by its forces against the growing number of Shiites who support Muqtada al-Sadr.
On the surface, this chain of events is mystifying. With the so-called Sunni triangle in flames after the gruesome Fallujah attacks, why is Mr. Bremer pushing the comparatively calm Shia south into battle? Here's one possible answer: Washington has given up on its plans to hand over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, and is now creating the chaos it needs to declare the handover impossible.
Under U.S. protection, Haitian paramilitary leader vows to kill Aristide, stamp out followers Simon Gardner, Reuters (Mar 29)
The former army officer convicted of murder said in an interview late Saturday at a plush, well-guarded hilltop retreat just outside Port-au-Prince that he sees himself as a patriotic leader of the Haitian people on a mission to stamp out Aristide's following.
Chamblain and rebels in control of swaths of Haiti's rural north are able to move around unhindered by a U.N.-backed multinational military force and local police. New Haitian National Police chief Leon Charles says detaining the likes of Chamblain is "over my head."
But the rebel leader says he is working with the new government of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue to integrate his cadres into the Haitian police force given Aristide disbanded the army and there is no money to set up a new one -- one of Chamblain's long-term goals.
Aristide supporters in Haiti report continuing threats, killings AP (Mar 27)
The attacks come as Haiti's new U.S.-backed government wages its own score-settling with the old regime, announcing Friday it will block dozens of former Aristide officials from leaving the country, including former prime minister Yvon Neptune.
Amid the uncertainty, dozens of members of Aristide's Lavalas Family party are reported to have gone into hiding, including Neptune, who has said he intends to stay in the country, despite receiving threats.
"The people that are in power say they are not involved in a witch hunt but it seems to me that is what they are participating in," Neptune said in a telephone interview last week.
Some say the attacks have already begun. During a Friday funeral procession for the five slain men, several police officers opened fire on mourners, injuring five, said Sonia Nozan, a 31-year-old community leader.
How we survived jail hell: interview with released Guantamo prisoners David Rose, Observer (Mar 14)
Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed, together with the other early arrivals at Guantanamo, had been described by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as 'the hardest of the hard core', lethal terrorists 'involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans'. Even last week the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was claiming America had been justified in holding them.
Yet despite the denial of legal rights or due process, the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have been forced to accept what the three men said all along - that they were never members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda or any other militant group. The Americans had justified their detention by claiming they were 'enemy combatants', but they were never armed and did not fight.
'They formally told us we were going home last Sunday [several weeks after this news was relayed to the media],' Rasul said. 'We had a final meeting with the FBI, and they tried to get us to sign a piece of paper which said something like I was admitting I'd had links with terrorism, and that if I ever did anything like this again the US could arrest me.' Like the other two detainees freed last week, Tarek Dergoul and Jamal al-Harith, they refused.
Latin Americas' new left challenges Bush at the Summit of the Americas Richard Boudreaux, LA Times (Jan 14)
Calling for a "new moral architecture" in the region to "favor the weakest," [Venezuelan President] Hugo Chavez said the rules of international economics have created "an infernal machine that produces more poor people each minute." He pointed out that the United States escaped the Depression not by relying on free markets but by launching a job-creating socialist program called the New Deal.
As the Venezuelan leader spoke, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva nodded and smiled enthusiastically. Across the room, Bush leaned on his hand, looking weary.
Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, charges US of plotting to remove him Agence France-Presse, Hindustan Times (Jan 12)
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez charged on Sunday that the United States was plotting with the opposition to oust him, and promised to put the issue before the Summit of the Americas, which begins on Monday in [Monterrey] Mexico.
Colombian assassination squads are effective with the help of U.S. Special Forces Frances Robles, Miami Herald (Jan 10)
The Colombian military has also created rapid-strike task forces similar to the U.S. units in Iraq that searched for Saddam Hussein.
"It's an elite military outfit designed with the flexibility to accomplish lots of things, including going after leadership targets," said Steve Lucas, spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which overseas American military operations in Latin America.
"The Colombians are fighting to win, and we support them. We think our support strategy is working," Lucas said before cautioning: "There's no silver bullet. This is not a struggle that will be over in a matter of weeks or months."

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EVENT SPOTLIGHT:

Thursday, May 27, 7pm

Third Coast Activist film night at Alamo Drafthouse:
"Bombies"

Bombies Bombies examines the problem of unexploded cluster bombs through the personal experiences of a group of Laotians and foreigners. These devastating devices, engineered to shred and maim humans, are still a standard part of the US arsenal and were dropped in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq, as reported in the Guardian, June 1, 2003.
where: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 4th and Colorado.
Tickets can be purchased at the door or in advance at drafthouse.com

What Can I Do Right Now?

Sign the petition to Congress on the plight of Haiti. Contact Senator John Cornyn, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Representative Lloyd Doggett, and urge them to support the petition's request for a return of Haiti to constitutional democracy, the cessation of U.S. support for repression in Haiti, and an investigation of the U.S. role in the coup. The capitol switchboard number is (800) 839-5276.

Call for an investigation on Iraq intelligence that includes the role of the White House, specifically the Secretary of Defense and Vice President. Austinites can contact Senator John Cornyn, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Representative Lloyd Doggett, urging them to support a broad and timely investigation. Capitol switchboard number is (800) 839-5276. Download and mail letters from our materials section.

Pick an angle to pursue and get a letter or op/ed into the media. Use our media skills page for strategies.

Table, post flyers, or set up a bulletin board in your neighborhood, school, church, or workplace. Find what you need in our materials section.

Support the Institute for Southern Studies' Campaign Against War Profiteering in Iraq - find out how.

Read some of the books listed on this site. Buy one for a friend.

Attend educational events and demonstrations and bring a friend.