THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Right wing money-grubbing elite literally careens off the tongue.

For all of you wild-eyed foreigners who come here, the 'Mericans are about to start a long holiday weekend. You may have the place pretty much to yourselves for the next few days. At any event, you likely won't be outnumbered . . . just the odd Yank with nothin' else to do . . . and the right-wingnut ranters . . . we'll see ya again on Tuesday . .


okseeyahbye

Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue

We have free health care, too.

Israeli Might Have Worked at Abu Ghraib
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 3, 2004


Filed at 9:46 a.m. ET

LONDON (AP) -- The American general formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib prison says there are signs Israelis were involved in interrogating Iraqi detainees at another facility.

Iraq considers pardon for rebels who killed US troops
03/07/2004 - 6:13:49 PM

Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's new government is considering offering an amnesty to Iraqi rebels who fought the US-led occupation, perhaps even pardoning those who killed Americans.

"If he was in opposition against the Americans, that will be justified because it was an occupation force," Georges Sada, Allawi's spokesman, said of the rebels. "We will give them freedom."

Choking the brutal 14-month insurgency is the No. 1 priority of Allawi's government, and the prime minister is expected to make a number of security-related policy announcements in coming days.

Besides the amnesty plan, those include a new emergency law that sets curfews in Iraq's trouble spots and resurrects of Iraq's death penalty, Sada said.

The amnesty plan is being considered, and a full pardon for insurgents who killed Americans is not a certainty, Sada said. The main thrust is to "start everything from new" by giving a second chance to rebel fighters who hand in their weapons and swear off the insurgency.

"There is still heavy discussion about this," said Sada, interviewed in the prime minister's office. He said the US Embassy has encouraged Allawi to try creative solutions to end the insurgency as long as they don't infringe on human rights.

There is wide acknowledgment that U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer's disbanding of Iraq's army and security services was a mistake, and forced people into fighting the occupation for money and revenge, Sada said.

"Some people were cheated, some were misled. Some did this because they had no salaries, no food, no bread," Sada said.

There appears to be little controversy about pardoning rebels who were not actual killers of US or Iraqi security forces. Sada said it was "no problem" to amnesty rebel financiers and those storing heavy weapons in their homes.

The offer appears to be intended to drive a wedge between nationalist Iraqis who fought the U.S.-led occupation and their growing alliance with Islamic fighters who want to drive Westerners and their influence out of Iraq.

One former colonel in Saddam Hussein's secret police said he and other former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party would welcome any amnesty. The man, now a Mosul taxi driver who asked that he simply be called Abu Hani, said the Islamist fighters would be unlikely to accept Allawi's offer.

"In my opinion, Allawi and (President Ghazi) al-Yawer are working to salvage the country from the ordeal. They are going in the right direction," Abu Hani said.

This sequence is a give away that the story is nonsense. The Iraqi's had long been hard at work before the Marine briefly put the American Flag over the statue. Also, had this been planned by our "psychological team", the Iraqi Flag would have been put there the first time around.

Your story is asking me to believe that some dumbass tried to claim credit for something, without naming the person who supposedly deserves the credit. That's bunk.

"The people had already tied a noose around the neck of the statue with some rope. They were trying to just tug on it and bring it down and were hitting it with sledgehammers; it was clearly getting crazy in the square. We were no longer in crowd control, as there was just no controlling this crowd at this time. We decided to just ride along with the crowd, and we started just kind of celebrating with the Iraqi people."

"Crowds of Iraqi citizens started coming out and cheering the American convoy. We started to do some PSYOP broadcasts about bringing about a free Iraq, but knowing that we were to continue some clearing operations; we were telling them to stay away from our military vehicles for their own safety. We eventually dismounted from our vehicle and continued to inform the civilians to stay back from the military vehicles. The Iraqi civilians were very receptive to us, and [we] continued to engage them with our interpreter."

Mistrust breeds resentment in Iraq
By Hugh Sykes
BBC correspondent in Iraq

The removal of Saddam Hussein may have been welcomed by many Iraqis. But attitudes to the coalition forces have hardened and, it seems, the coalition's lack of trust in the Iraqi people is at least in part to blame.
Looking through my photographs from Iraq last year, there are so many happy faces, so many smiles.

In Baghdad, Basra, Karbala and the small town of Hilla near Babylon, people kept on saying: "Please - take our picture mister."

Once it was a group of fellow diners at an outside kebab cafe, another time a group of women heavily shrouded in their black "chadors" caught my eye, pulled the cotton away from their faces so that it only covered their hair, and the flash lit up their smiles in the night.

Many Iraqis I met also said: "Thank you Bush, thank you Blair, we love freedom."

At a cafe in Basra, two sailors sat with me as I smoked a hubble bubble and explained how much better their lives had become thanks to the invasion - and one of them - Abu Dijassem - said: "We love the British."
I nodded gratefully, thinking this was just a pleasantry for my benefit, and he said "No, no we really do... look!", and he brought out his wallet - in the little plastic window where people usually keep pictures of their families there was... David Beckham.
"Ah, you like Manchester United, then," I said.

And a little voice at my elbow corrected me with news that was only a couple of days old. "No no! Real Madrid."

"Oh, hello - who are you?" I asked.

"I am Moataz. I am 10."

"And you like your football..."

"Yes."

And I had a flash of inspiration - I told him: "I live in London, near Highbury - where Arsenal play."

"Ah," said Moataz. "Patrick Viera, Thierry Henri...David Seaman." And he did a perfect goalie's save from his chair.

It seems a long time ago, another world almost, that happy evening in the Basra coffee house.

And as the occupation deepened, Iraqis began to feel that their liberation was being damaged, diluted, diminished.

Language barrier

The coalition didn't trust the people they'd set free.

The Americans, especially, retreated behind rolls and rolls of razor wire, pointed their revolvers and their rifles at passionate but peaceful crowds, and barked orders in English at people for whom courtesy is one of the essential qualities of life.

In Hilla, a quiet town full of devout Shia Muslims delighted that Saddam had gone, two local petrol station attendants, Faris and Riath Hussein, joined crowds lining the main road to cheer the coalition troops as they passed through on their way to Baghdad.
Two days later, Faris was driving Riath along the same road - as they approached a checkpoint, they thought they were being told to carry on.

They carried on. US marines opened fire.

Faris was killed, and a bullet hit Riath through the front of his head, blinding him in both eyes.

I counted 19 bullet holes in their Toyota car, parked outside the home that their brothers and their families shared.

I sat with Riath. Two girls came into the room. When I asked him if they were his daughters, he broke down and wept.

"I don't know," he choked. "I can't see them."

In the photograph I took of Riath, with five-year-old Noor and six-year-old Rana, the confusion and fierce resentment on the girls' faces is a vivid metaphor for some of the fundamental mistakes the coalition made and their angry consequences.

Lack of trust

Many of my Iraqis friends say this is true including one man in particular - Dr Hussein al-Shahristani, the nuclear physicist who spent 12 years in Abu Ghraib prison for defying Saddam Hussein. He refused to work on Saddam's nuclear weapons' programme.

He told me this week that what had gone wrong from the very beginning was the Americans' mistrust of the Iraqi people.


"They considered every Iraqi as a potential enemy," he complained. Instead, he says, they should have realised realising they had a resourceful and highly-educated people mostly grateful for their liberation, and eager to be left to get on with recovery and reconstruction themselves.
And, he believes, the consequence of this haughty, insulting attitude was an eventual loss of patience with the coalition, the rise of the violence that has now become routine.

And the greatest danger he sees now is the already developing unholy alliance between al-Qaeda and the well-funded, well-organised and highly-disciplined former Baath party machine of Saddam Hussein.

His principal instrument of terror and control is creeping back into key positions once again in councils and committees across the land.

There are two continuing failures which my Iraqi friends most deeply resent.

They still feel unable to walk the streets of their capital city in the relative cool of the evenings because of crime, kidnapping and suicide bombers.

And - above all - they cannot comprehend how the richest and most powerful nations in the world have been in Iraq for 15 months now and still the electricity supply is unreliable.

For the second summer in succession, they are having to endure daily temperatures of 55C in the shade without a reliable power supply for their ceiling fans.

Long before the serious violence erupted last year, a man in a crowd warned me, you must make our lives better quickly because in the hot weather we grow angry. Hot weather, hot mood.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 3 July, 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

"We Don't Trust You Guys"
Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent

Baghdad

A team of US military officers acted as censors over all coverage of the hearings of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on Thursday, destroying videotape of Saddam in chains and deleting the entire recorded legal submissions of 11 senior members of his former regime.

A US network cameraman who demanded the return of his tapes, which contained audios of the hearings, said he was told by a US officer: "No. They belong to us now. And anyway, we don't trust you guys."

According to American journalists present at the 30-minute hearing of Saddam and 11 former ministers at Baghdad airport, an American admiral in civilian clothes told camera crews that the judge had demanded that there should be no sound recording of the initial hearing. He ordered crews to unplug their sound wires. Several of the six crews present pretended to obey the instruction. "We learnt later," one of them said, "that the judge didn't order us to turn off our sound. The Americans lied--it was they who wanted no sound. The judge wanted sound and pictures."

Initially, crews were told that a US Department of Defence camera crew would provide the sound for their silent tapes. But when CNN and CBS crews went to the former occupation authority headquarters--now the US embassy-- they found that three US officers ordered the censorship of tape which showed Saddam being led into the courtroom with a chain round his waist which was connected to handcuffs round his wrists. The Americans gave no reason for this censorship.

"They were rude and they didn't care," another American television crew member said. "They were running the show. The Americans decided what the world could and could not see of this trial--and it was meant to be an Iraqi trial. There was a British official in the courtroom whom we were not allowed to take pictures of. The other men were US troops who had been ordered to wear ordinary clothes so that they were 'civilians' in the court."

Three US officers viewed the tapes taken by two CNN cameras, 'Al-Djezaira' (a local, American-funded Iraqi channel), and the US government. "Fortunately, they were lazy and they didn't check all the tapes properly so we got our 'audio' through in the satellite to London," one of the crew members told The Independent yesterday. "I had pretended to unplug the sound from the camera but the man who claimed he was a US admiral didn't understand cameras and we were able to record sound. The American censors at the embassy were inattentive--that's how we got the sound out."

The only thing the Americans managed to censor from most of the tapes was Saddam's comment that "this is theatre--Bush is the real criminal."

Television stations throughout the world were astonished yesterday when the first tapes of Saddam's trial arrived without sound and have still not been informed that the Americans censored the material. "What can we do when an American official tells us the judge doesn't want sound--and then we find out that they lied and the judge does want the sound?" an American camera operator asked.

Video showed the face--and audiotape revealed the voice--of Judge Raid Juhi, whose name was widely reported in the Arab press yesterday. According to the camera crews, Judge Juhi wanted the world to hear Saddam's voice. Nevertheless the Americans erased the entire audiotape of the hearings of the 11 former Saddam ministers, including that of Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, and "Chemical" Ali, Saddam's cousin accused of gassing the Kurds at Halabja. The US Department of Defence tape of their hearings has been taken by the US authorities so there is now no technical record of the words of these 11 men, save for the notebooks of "pool" reporters--four Americans and two Iraqis--who were present.

Judge Juhi said not long ago that "I have no secrets--a judge must not be ashamed of the decisions he takes."

The Americans apparently think differently.