THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

Anti-war veterans' group: War crimes are 'encouraged'
01/21/2008 @ 8:52 am
Filed by RAW STORY

At an event in Watertown, New York on Saturday, members of Iraq Veterans Against War charged that war crimes against civilians were encouraged by unit commanders.


"The killing of innocent civilians is policy," said veteran Mike Blake. "It's unit policy and it's Army policy. It's not official policy, but it's what's happens on the ground everyday. It's what unit commanders individually encourage."

Veteran Matt Howard concurred: "These decisions are coming from the top down," Howard said. "The tactics that we use, the policies that the military engages, will create situations, create dynamics, create -- ultimately -- atrocity."

Blake and Howard were among four veterans speaking at Watertown's Different Drummer Cafe, in a preliminary event to the 'Winter Soldier' gathering scheduled in Washington, D.C. in March. Named after the 1971 event in which John Kerry read testimony from soldiers on atrocities they had committed, this year's Winter Soldier will feature Iraq War veterans speaking about war crimes they committed or witnessed.

In Watertown, veteran Jon Turner blamed himself as well as the orders he was given. "It was my decision," Turner said. "I made it. Now I have to live with the fact I see someone's eyes screaming at me after I shot them."

Others have previously questioned US attacks that have killed civilians, though not as sharply.

In 2006, a Berlin attorney filed a war crimes lawsuit against erstwhile Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the International Federation for Human Rights, the Republican Attorneys' Association and more than 40 other national and international human rights groups.

Germany's federal prosecutor announced in April of the following year that she would not take on the suit.

In related news,

'Collateral' deaths in Afghanistan surpassed Taliban killings in 2007

In July 2007, independent tallied show US and NATO troops were responsible for more civilian deaths in the first half of the year than the Taliban militants they were fighting.

The United Nations counted 314 civilian deaths at the hands of Western-led forces by the end of June of 2007, compared with 279 people killed by the Taliban and other militants.

The rate of Western-caused civilian deaths between January and June exceeded the same measure for all of 2006. Human Rights Watch found US and NATO troops killed 230 civilians in Afghanistan last year. In that same year, the group found at least 669 Afghan civilians were killed as a result of Taliban attacks.

Military leaders said the comparison is fundamentally unfair because civilian deaths caused by Western forces are inadvertent collateral damage whereas the Taliban militants deliberately target innocent people.

I'm not surprised; this administration gets away with murder.

BAGHDAD -- Maj. Gen. Hussein al-Awadi, a former official in Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, became the commander of the Iraqi National Police despite a 2003 law barring the party from government.

But now, under new legislation promoted as way to return former Baathists to public life, the 56-year-old and thousands like him could be forced out of jobs they have been allowed to hold, according to Iraqi lawmakers and the government agency that oversees ex-Baathists.

"This new law is very confusing," Awadi said. "I don't really know what it means for me."

He is not alone. More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation.

Approved by parliament this month under pressure from U.S. officials, the law was heralded by President Bush and Iraqi leaders as a way to soothe the deep anger of many ex-Baathists -- primarily Sunnis but also many Shiites such as Awadi -- toward the Shiite-led government.

Yet U.S. officials and even legislators who voted for the measure, which still requires approval by Iraq's presidency council, acknowledge that its impact is hard to assess from its text and will depend on how it is implemented. Some say the law's primary aim is not to return ex-Baathists to work, but to recognize and compensate those harmed by the party. Of the law's eight stated justifications, none mentions reinstating ex-Baathists to their jobs.

"The law is about as clear as mud," said one U.S. senior diplomat.

GETTING IRAQ WRONG . . . AGAIN.

This has got to be embarrassing for the Washington Post. Or it would be, if their editorial board had the capacity for shame. Three days ago, WaPo ran a big Sunday op-ed on Iraq by three of the biggest supporters -- Michael O'Hanlon, Fred Kagan, and Gen. Jack Keane -- of the "surge," a piece whose opening sentence touted the success of the troop buildup by citing the recent de-Baathification law as "an important step toward political reconciliation." Today, however, a front page WaPo story reports what many of us said from the beginning: the law is not an indication of political compromise, but rather a misleadingly-named Shia effort to further sideline an already outraged Sunni populace.

The article reports, "Approved by parliament this month under pressure from U.S. officials, the law was heralded by President Bush and Iraqi leaders as a way to soothe the deep anger of many ex-Baathists -- primarily Sunnis but also many Shiites such as Awadi -- toward the Shiite-led government." Except that, of course, it did nothing of the kind: "More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation." Oops! One prominent Sunni politician even described it as "bait," saying the law is set up so ex-Baathists have to go to a specific location to register, where, he says, they're likely to be killed.

Observers like Kagan, Keene, and O'Hanlon have demonstrated again and again that they don't understand Iraq. They may understand the military, but when it comes to the vital political issues involved, they either don't have a clue or they're dissembling on the prime journalistic real estate of the leading news outlet in our nation's capital. Either way, it's disgraceful.

--AJ Rossmiller

Posted by Phoebe Connelly on January 23, 2008 11:54 AM | Permalink

"These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, 'independent' validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq," it said."

Bush and his coharts had got a wonderful moral ethical emotional support from the majority of standard magazines and daily.
No wonder he had gone berserk with his lie languages.

BAGHDAD (AP) ?- A thunderous blast tore through a vacant apartment building in northern Iraq on Wednesday, killing at least 17 civilians and wounding more than 130 in adjacent houses just minutes after the Iraqi army arrived to investigate tips about a weapons cache.

Rescue crews searched under toppled walls, collapsed ceilings and piles of debris tossed by the explosion that blew apart the empty building, which Iraqi authorities said was used by insurgents to stash weapons and bombs.

The hunt through the wreckage stretched for hours, raising the possibility the final casualty toll could climb. The huge blast went off just after the troops arrived, and no soldier was reported killed.

Instead, the explosion ravaged dozens of old homes and collapsed a three-story building in a mostly Sunni neighborhood in Mosul, about 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.

The blast also reinforced U.S. claims this week that Mosul ?- Iraq's third-largest city ?- is now the last urban center with a strong presence of al-Qaida in Iraq. American and Iraqi forces have been on the offensive against insurgents in and around Baghdad, but Mosul continues to be a center of gravity for al-Qaida in Iraq, according to the military.

Mosul, a major transportation hub with highways leading west to Syria and south to Baghdad, is considered a crucial conduit in the flow of money and foreign fighters to support the insurgency.

The city's internal tensions also provide fertile ground for al-Qaida among fellow Sunni Arabs. Extremists apparently seek to exploit ethnic tension between majority Sunnis and minority Kurds, who together form about 85 percent of Mosul's population of roughly 2 million.

Wednesday's explosion came shortly after the army received calls that insurgents were using the vacant building as a shelter and a bomb-making factory, according to Brig. Saeed al-Jubouri, a police spokesman.

That raised the possibility that insurgents may have tried to draw the soldiers into a trap.

But Brig. Abdul-Karim al-Jubouri, who heads security operations for the Mosul police, said authorities did not believe they were being lured. He said that ?- if it were designed as a trap ?- insurgents would have waited for security forces to get inside the building to kill as many of them as possible.

Also, he said, insurgents usually warn Sunni residents to leave before a bombing ?- particularly if the intended targets are U.S. and Iraqi forces. On Wednesday, there was no advance word in the Sunni neighborhood.

"The insurgents used the building to store weapons and bombs, and it seems they blew up the building after learning that Iraqi soldiers had discovered their plans," Abdul-Karim al-Jubouri said.

The police spokesman al-Jubouri said 17 civilians were killed and 134 injured.

"Everything on the kitchen shelves fell on me, and I started to scream for help until my husband came and took me to the hospital," said 25-year-old Um Mohammed, who was treated for wounds to her head, legs and left hand.

Her husband, 32-year-old taxi driver Abu Mohammed, escaped with minor injuries to his hands.

"I was standing near my house behind the exploded building when a very loud blast took place, and the smoke covered the whole area," he said. "I was confused and went inside my house to search for my wife. Everything in the house was turned upside down. I saw my wife lying on the ground and I carried her to my car and headed to the hospital. What has happened is a disaster."

Attacks have persisted in recent months in northern Iraq even as violence has declined in Baghdad and other areas.

In a separate incident, a suicide car bomber targeted a police convoy near the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least five civilians and wounding 11, police said.

In the capital, Baghdad, gunmen fired on Iraqi soldiers resting on the side of a highway, killing three and wounding at least one, according to police and the U.S. military. The attack in the heart of Baghdad provided a deadly example of the challenges facing the Iraqi forces as they work to take over security so U.S.-led troops can eventually go home.

Five militant Iraqi Sunni groups said in a joint statement posted on the Internet that they were stepping up attacks on American troops in Iraq in support of Palestinians in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

The statement announced the launching of what was described as the "Iraqi Resistance Campaign to Help Gaza" and accused President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of responsibility for the deteriorating situation in the coastal strip.

In another development, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accepted an invitation to visit Iraq, but no date has been set, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry announced. It would be the first visit to Iraq by a top Iranian leader since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Iran had no immediate word on the visit.

The two Muslim neighbors fought a ruinous eight-year war in the 1980s that left an estimated 1 million people killed or wounded. Relations have improved since the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime

Like I said ican, the strength of AQ in Iraq was too small to justify an attack on Iraq. Besides it was in Kurd controlled territory and we could have taken it out easily any time we wanted without launching an invasion of Iraq.

AQ in Iraq was small in December 2001 when members of al-Qaeda fled our Afghanistan invasion for iraq. It was not small in March 2003 when the USA invaded Iraq. We took out AQ easily by invading it on the ground with the help of the Kurds after we invaded Iraq. It would have been stupid to duplicate in Iraq Clinton's failure to take out AQ from the air in Afghanistan. Did we have to remove Saddam to accomplish on the ground removing AQ from Iraq? Probably! We know that from the difficulty we have had in removing al-Qaeda from Iraq after invading Iraq.

AQ was not the reason we attacked Iraq. It may be the reason in your mind but that doesn't count for much in the real world. On this thread we try to seperate fantasy from reality.

In this thread you continue to promote fantasy over reality. Bush's reasons for invading Iraq are irrelevant. What is relevant are the 12 relevant and valid reaons (i.e., whereases) for invading Iraq specified in Congress's October 16, 2002 resolution authorizing the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq. The 11 invalid reasons in that resolution are irrelevant. Your opinion contradicting that resolution doesn't count for much in the real world.

ican, No matter what the US congress authorized, it's still against international laws. ...

MSNBC staff and news service reports

updated 6:48 p.m. ET, Wed., June. 16, 2004

WASHINGTON - The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday that Osama bin Laden met with a top Iraqi official in 1994 but found "no credible evidence" of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida in attacks against the United States.