By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 30 January 2006

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

Zarqawi's Forces Kill U.S.-Allied Iraqis And Impose Strict Law, Witnesses Say

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 6, 2005; A20

BAGHDAD, Sept. 5 -- Fighters loyal to militant leader Abu Musab Zarqawi asserted control over the key Iraqi border town of Qaim on Monday, killing U.S. collaborators and enforcing strict Islamic law, according to tribal members, officials, residents and others in the town and nearby villages.

Residents said the foreign-led fighters controlled by Zarqawi, a Jordanian, apparently had been exerting authority in the town, within two miles of the Syrian border, since at least the start of the weekend. A sign posted at an entrance to the town declared, "Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Qaim."

by Black Commentator; Black Commentator; April 16, 2005

The debate on the draft, to the extent it exists, focuses too heavily on the U.S. military crisis in Iraq and far too little on American domestic arrangements that enabled the Bush Pirates to launch their War Against All, in which Iraq was supposed to be only the first, triumphal episode. Although it is unquestionably true that Iraqi resistance has strained U.S. forces to the breaking point – compelling the Bush men to torture their own soldiers with extended tours of duty and to prepare a selective draft of citizens possessing special skills – it does not follow that a draft will rescue the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Grand Plan. Quite the opposite: a universal military and national service draft such as proposed by Harlem’s Charles Rangel and a small group of other congressmen would utterly wreck the social compact that makes endless war politically possible, by forcing Americans to ponder the consequences of U.S. foreign policy to their own families and friends for the first time in 32 years.

When a state is determined to pursue war, and all forms of indirect symbolic protest actions have failed to sway politicians to halt their imperialist aggression, the only remaining option is direct action by the working class. One option is a general strike by workers that can effect the production and transpiration of military capital, that is the materials essential for the war machine. The other is to deprive the military of the labor it needs to fight the war. The slogan from the Vietnam War protests deliberately speaks to this, "What if they had a war, and no one came?" The U.S. military is overwhelmingly recruited from the working class, and convincing our class as a whole to refuse to work for this blood money may be our best chance for both ending the war in Iraq and limiting the imperialist ambitions of the U.S. for future decades.

By Robert Fisk in Baghdad - 29 July 2004

http://www.k1m.com/antiwarblog/archives/000113.html 

Iraq, we are told by Mr Blair, is safer. It is not. US military reports clearly show much of the violence in Iraq is not revealed to journalists, and thus goes largely unreported. This account of the insurgency across Iraq over three days last week provides astonishing proof that Iraq under its new, American-appointed Prime Minister, has grown more dangerous and violent.

read Tarek's blog at www.tarek.2y.net/iraq

The News From Planet Falluja

by CHRISTIAN PARENTI

[posted online on July 5, 2004]

Tariq is an upper-middle-class Canadian medical student of Palestinian origin. He is a Muslim, fluent in Arabic and English, very smart, very young, brave and a bit naïve. He is an obsessive computer geek with a tendency toward pedantry on matters technological. Over the past two years he has spent several months in Palestine doing solidarity work.

Resistance attacks continue despite handover

by Al Jazeera

Tuesday 29 June 2004 6:23 GMT

Three US marines have been killed in a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad in the first reported fatal attack on US occupation forces in Iraq since the formal handover of authority to an interim government.

ZNet | Iraq

Control of Security Forces

by Dahr Jamail; The NewStandard; June 14, 2004

Baghdad , Jun 14 - Even as authorities for the US-run occupation cede a greater share of security responsibilities to Iraqi forces, spokespeople for the Iraqi police and paramilitaries in many areas of the war-torn country say they lack the legitimacy and tools necessary to carry out their duties. With the transfer of official sovereignty to a US-sanctioned governing body just over two weeks away, officials with both the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and the Iraqi Police complain they are understaffed, under-equipped and undermined by the US.

The “Iraqi Resistance” and Worker-communists

from www.wpiraq.org

May 18,2004

“The situation in Nasiriyiah today May 18th is
relatively calm. The Mahdi Army fled the fight against

By Aladdin Saad

TAJI, Iraq (Reuters) - Guerrillas detonated a car bomb outside an Iraqi security force base just north of Baghdad Sunday, killing nine people and wounding dozens in the latest attack on Iraqis cooperating with occupying troops.