Topic(s): Freedom of Speech
Date Posted: 07.24.07 University of Colorado Set To Fire Ward Churchill by Ira Chernus Published on Friday, July 20, 2007 by CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/20/2647/ On Tuesday, July 24, the University of Colorado Board of Regents will decide whether to accept the recommendation of CU... [Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Iraq
Date Posted: 07.17.07

'A DEAD IRAQI IS JUST ANOTHER DEAD IRAQI... YOU KNOW, SO WHAT?'
By Leonard Doyle in Washington

The Independent/UK
Published: 12 July 2007

Interviews with US veterans show for the first time the pattern of
brutality in Iraq

It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the
US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise
the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad
apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing
a heroic job under trying circumstances.

That perception will take a severe knock today with the publication
in The Nation magazine of a series of in-depth interviews with 50
combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US. In the interviews,
veterans have described acts of violence in which US forces have
abused or killed Iraqi men, women and children with impunity.

The report steers clear of widely reported atrocities, such as the
massacre in Haditha in 2005, but instead unearths a pattern of human
rights abuses. "It's not individual atrocity," Specialist Garett
Reppenhagen, a sniper from the 263rd Armour Battalion, said. "It's
the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."

A number of the troops have returned home bearing mental and physical
scars from fighting a war in an environment in which the insurgents
are supported by the population. Many of those interviewed have come
to oppose the US military presence in Iraq, joining the groundswell
of public opinion across the US that views the war as futile.

This view is echoed in Washington, where increasing numbers of
Democrats and Republicans are openly calling for an early withdrawal
from Iraq. And the Iraq quagmire has pushed President George Bush's
poll ratings to an all-time low.

Journalists and human rights groups have published numerous reports
drawing attention to the killing of Iraqi civilians by US forces. The
Nation's investigation presents for the first time named military
witnesses who back those assertions. Some participated themselves.

Through a combination of gung-ho recklessness and criminal behaviour
born of panic, a narrative emerges of an army that frequently commits
acts of cold-blooded violence. A number of interviewees revealed that
the military will attempt to frame innocent bystanders as insurgents,
often after panicked American troops have fired into groups of
unarmed Iraqis. The veterans said the troops involved would round
up any survivors and accuse them of being in the resistance while
planting Kalashnikov AK47 rifles beside corpses to make it appear
that they had died in combat.

"It would always be an AK because they have so many of these
lying around," said Joe Hatcher, 26, a scout with the 4th Calvary
Regiment. He revealed the army also planted 9mm handguns and shovels
to make it look like the civilians were shot while digging a hole
for a roadside bomb.

"Every good cop carries a throwaway," Hatcher said of weapons planted
on innocent victims in incidents that occurred while he was stationed
between Tikrit and Samarra, from February 2004 to March 2005. Any
survivors were sent to jail for interrogation.

There were also deaths caused by the reckless behaviour of military
convoys.

Sgt Kelly Dougherty of the Colorado National Guard described a
hit-and-run in which a military convoy ran over a 10-year-old boy
and his three donkeys, killing them all. "Judging by the skid marks,
they hardly even slowed down.

But, I mean... your order is that you never stop."

The worst abuses seem to have been during raids on private homes when
soldiers were hunting insurgents. Thousands of such raids have taken
place, usually at dead of night. The veterans point out that most
are futile and serve only to terrify the civilians, while generating
sympathy for the resistance.

Sgt John Bruhns, 29, of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armoured Division,
described a typical raid. "You want to catch them off guard," he
explained. "You want to catch them in their sleep ... You grab the
man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You
put him up against the wall... Then you go into a room and you tear
the room to shreds. You'll ask 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have
any anti-US propaganda?'

"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sgt
Bruhns said.

"So you'll take his sofa cushions and dump them. You'll open up his
closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically
leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it." And at the
end, if the soldiers don't find anything, they depart with a "Sorry
to disturb you. Have a nice evening".

Sgt Dougherty described her squad leader shooting an Iraqi civilian
in the back in 2003. "The mentality of my squad leader was like,
'Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back
in Colorado'," she said. "He just seemed to view every Iraqi as a
potential terrorist."

'It would always happen. We always got the wrong house...'

"People would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into a raid,
like, 'Oh fuck, we're gonna get the wrong house'. Cause it would
always happen. We always got the wrong house."

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Topic(s): 
Date Posted: 07.17.07

Robert Fisk: TE Lawrence had it right about Iraq
'Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active and 98 per cent passively
sympathetic'

Sunday Independent/UK
Published: 14 July 2007

Back in 1929, Lawrence of Arabia wrote the entry for "Guerrilla" in the
14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is a chilling read -
and here I thank one of my favourite readers, Peter Metcalfe of
Stevenage, for sending me TE's remarkable article - because it contains
so ghastly a message to the American armies in Iraq.

Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18
war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): "... suppose
they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front
or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile
as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. The
Arabs might be a vapour..."

How typical of Lawrence to use the horror of gas warfare as a metaphor
for insurgency. To control the land they occupied, he continued, the
Turks "would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and
a post could not be less than 20 men. The Turks would need 600,000 men
to meet the combined ill wills of all the local Arab people. They had
100,000 men available."

Now who does that remind you of? The "fortified post every four square
miles" is the ghostly future echo of George W Bush's absurd "surge".
The Americans need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill will of the
Iraqi people, and they have only 150,000 available. Donald Rumsfeld,
the architect of "war lite" is responsible for that. Yet still these
rascals get away with it.

Hands up those readers who know that Canada's Defence Minister, Gordon
O'Connor, actually sent a letter to Rumsfeld two days before his
departure in disgrace from the Pentagon, praising this disreputable
man's "leadership". Yes, O'Connor wanted "to take this opportunity to
congratulate you on your many achievements (sic) as Secretary of
Defence, and to recognise the significant contribution you have made in
the fight against terrorism". The world, gushed the ridiculous
O'Connor, had benefited from Rumsfeld's "leadership in addressing the
complex issues in play".

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Palestine / Israel
Date Posted: 07.17.07

Special Features By Richard Falk

Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust
by Richard Falk, TFF Associate
July 11, '07

There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to
unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody
history of the human species. Its massiveness, unconcealed genocidal
intent, and reliance on the mentality and instruments of modernity
give its enactment in the death camps of Europe a special status in
our moral imagination. This special status is exhibited in the
continuing presentation of its gruesome realities throughfilm, books,
and a variety of cultural artifacts more than six decades after the
events in question ceased. The permanent memory of the Holocaust is
also kept alive by the existence of several notable museums devoted
exclusively to the depiction of the horrors that took place during the
period of Nazi rule in Germany.

Against this background, it is especially painful for me, as an
American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and
intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a
reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as 'holocaust.' The word is
derived from the Greek holos (meaning 'completely') and kaustos
(meaning 'burnt'), and was used in ancient Greece to refer to the
complete burning of a sacrificial offering to a divinity. Because
sucha background implies a religious undertaking, there is some
inclination in Jewish literature to prefer the Hebrew word 'Shoah'
that can be translated roughly as 'calamity,' and was the name given
to the 1985 epic nine-hour narration of the Nazi experience by the
French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann. The Germans themselves were more
antiseptic in their designation, officially naming their undertaking
as the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Qestion.' The labelis, of course,
inaccurate as a variety of non-Jewish identities were also targets of
this genocidal assault, including the Roma and Sinti('gypsies),
Jehovah Witnesses, gays, disabled persons, political opponents.

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of
Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective
atrocity? I think not.

The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they
express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and
its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering
conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of
conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate
appeal to the governments of the world and to international public
opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies
from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever theethos of 'a
responsibility to protect,' recently adopted by the UN Security
Council as the basis of 'humanitarian intervention' is applicable, it
would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from
further pain and suffering.

But it would be unrealistic to expect the UN to do anything in the
face of this crisis, given the pattern of US support for Israel and
taking into account the extent to which European governments have lent
their weight to recent illicit efforts to crush Hamas as a Palestinian
political force.

Even if the pressures exerted on Gaza were to be acknowledged as
having genocidal potential and even if Israel's impunity under
America's geopolitical umbrella is put aside, there is little
assurance that any sort of protective action in Gaza would be
taken. There were strong advance signals in 1994 of a genocide to come
in Rwanda, and yet nothing was done to stop it; the UN and the world
watched while the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnians took place, an
incident that the World Court described as 'genocide' a few months
ago; similarly, there have been repeated allegations of genocidal
conduct in Darfur over the course of the last several years, and
hardly an international finger has been raised, either to protect
those threatened or to resolve the conflict in some manner that shares
power and resources among the contending ethnic groups.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Lebanon
Date Posted: 07.17.07

Israel-Lebanon: Groups Call for Action on `War Crimes'

Published on Saturday, July 14, 2007 by the Inter Press Service
by Brian D. Pellot

UNITED NATIONS - Allegations of unpunished war crimes and a general
lack of accountability still plague Israeli-Lebanese relations one year
after the Israel-Hezbollah war erupted, Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch charged in separate statements Thursday.

The conflict erupted last July when Hezbollah forces attacked several
villages in Israel, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two
more who have yet to be accounted for.

Human Rights Watch says that of the estimated 1,125 dead, 4,399 injured
and one million displaced in Lebanon during the conflict, the majority
affected were civilians due to the Israel Defense Forces' relentless
missile strikes, bombings and artillery attacks aimed at civilian areas.

After initially warning civilians to flee southern Lebanon, the Israeli
army proceeded to attack as if all had fled when in fact they had not,
HRW said.

`Clearly there was recklessness, and an even larger number of civilian
casualties could have resulted,' Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty
International's Middle East and North Africa program, told IPS.

About 160 Israelis were also killed, mostly soldiers. Regarding the two
who remain missing, Smart said: `There has been no information on them,
and they've been denied access to the International Committee of the
Red Cross.'

`Our statement serves as a reminder that these issues cannot go
unaddressed,' he added.

`Both sides in this conflict violated the laws of war, but a full year
later, no one has been held accountable,' Middle East Director Sarah
Leah Whitson said in the Human Rights Watch statement.

[Continue Reading]