BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi police have accused U.S. troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The villagers were killed after U.S. troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers’ animals and blew up the house, the document said.

Accusations that U.S. troops have killed civilians are commonplace in Iraq, though most are judged later to be unfounded or exaggerated.

A U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Tim Keefe, said that the U.S. military has no information to support the allegations and that he had not heard of them before.
seattletimes.nwsource.com

At the beginning of the Iraq war, the UN entrusted $23bn of Iraqi money to the US-led coalition to redevelop the country. With the infrastructure of the country still in ruins, where has all that money gone?

…In a dilapidated maternity and paediatric hospital in Diwaniyah, 100 miles south of Baghdad, Zahara and Abbas, premature twins just two days old, lie desperately ill. The hospital has neither the equipment nor the drugs that could save their lives. On the other side of the world, in a federal courthouse in Virginia, US, two men – one a former CIA agent and Republican candidate for Congress, the other a former army ranger – are found guilty of fraudulently obtaining $3m (£1.7m) intended for the reconstruction of Iraq. These two events have no direct link, but they are none the less products of the same thing: a financial scandal that in terms of sheer scale must rank as one of the greatest in history.
guardian.co.uk

HANOI – Nguyen Thi Thuy was 22 when she left her village to help build roads for the North Vietnamese army during the war. She remembers crawling into tunnels during the day and covering her mouth with a wet rag when the United States military sprayed the landscape with defoliant.

“I didn’t know what it was then, but it was white,” she recalled. “The sky and earth were scorched. The earth had lost all its greenery. We didn’t know it was Agent Orange at that time.”

And now, more than three decades later, an international conference here on Thursday and Friday, will examine the social impacts of the notorious wartime herbicide. Until now, research on the effects of the chemical has focused primarily on science that proves a link between dioxin exposure and numerous diseases.

Coming, as it does, ahead of April’s appeal proceedings in New York on a lawsuit brought by Vietnamese victims against the manufacturers of the defoliant, the conference has added relevance.
antiwar.com

The BBC asks this morning, “does Iraq qualify for the definition of civil war?” Do five out of seven pundits agree? There is apparently in the minds of UK Defense Minister Reid and Rumsfeld a vast chasm between ‘sectarian conflict’ and ‘civil war’. What’s the dif? Is there a critical mass of carnage–should we be getting out our Final Four-style scorecards?

When Rumsfeld finally figures out the ‘plan’, will he declare civil war? Of all the horrific absurdities of this war, this bizarre debate is way up there. What difference does it make to people on the ground what we call it? Again, it’s a struggle about who gets to call what what. Allawi says it’s a civil war, but this is dismissed as political opportunism. What about Bush and Blair’s political stake in insisting it’s not?

What everybody has to understand is that WE are the namers and the doers, the only legitimate agents on the scene. ‘Clearly defined groups engaged in sectarian warfare…’ that’s the political definition, and since WE have decided that hasn’t happened yet, it isn’t happening period.

Yes it is, no it’s not: how much ink has been spilled on the right and left in the West as they wrangle to characterize Iraq’s long decline?

I always found it crazy that the U.S. appeared to support the Shia for these past three years: they wanted an Islamist theocracy then? Their interests dovetail with Iran’s? I knew that couldn’t be so. Now things have settled into a more comprehensible picture: Saddam’s Baathists are of course our natural allies. Like attracts like after all. Funny what blowing the dome off a mosque can do.

While we engage this burning question of the day with our panels of experts, our Orientalists who have engaged in this sort of prurience for 300 years anyway, tortured bodies are popping up everywhere like dandelions, families are fleeing their homes for their lives, and people are blowing up.

Is ‘Swarmer’ the newest Ninja Turtle?

“We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more – if this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”

Iraq is in the middle of civil war, the country’s former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has told the BBC.

He said Iraq had not got to the point of no return, but if it fell apart sectarianism would spread abroad.

The UK and US have repeatedly denied Iraq is facing a civil war, but Mr Allawi suggested there was no other way to describe the sectarian violence.

Analysts say Mr Allawi’s comments are part of political manoeuvring as talks continue over creation of a government.

UK Defence Secretary John Reid insisted that the terrorists were failing to drive Iraq into civil war.

Speaking to British troops in Basra, he said he thought the political and religious leaders had shown great restraint.

Those trying to turn one community on another were not succeeding, he added.
bbc.co.uk

Rumsfeld: We’re trying to figure out what to do if Iraq falls into civil war
America has begun making plans to deal with a civil war in Iraq, three years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

As sectarian violence continues to claim lives every day, Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, has disclosed that United States military intelligence is holding war games to predict what might happen in such a situation.

Mr Rumsfeld’s admission that “the intelligence community are thinking about this and analysing it” comes despite the White House’s insistence that Iraq is not slipping into civil war.

* KIRKUK – The U.S. military said in a statement that the head of the Iraqi armed forces was in a convoy struck by a roadside bomb near Kirkuk on Thursday, but escaped injury. In the initial report on Thursday, Iraqi police said General Babakir Zebari, Iraq’s chief of staff, was not in the motorcade, although it was comprised of vehicles he normally used. Three Iraqi soldiers were wounded in the attack, the U.S. military said on Saturday.
BAGHDAD – The bodies of 16 victims of shootings were found in different areas of the capital, police said.
BAQUBA – Two gunmen were killed and 18 suspects arrested when the Iraqi army launched a search operation near Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, the Iraqi military said.
DUJAIL – Two civilians were found dead inside their car near Dujail, 50 km north of Baghdad on Saturday. The bodies of two brothers were also found in the same area on Friday, police said.
BAIJI – A police officer and his brother were killed by gunmen in Baiji, 180 km north of Baghdad, police said.
TIKRIT – Two U.S. soldiers were killed and another wounded in an attack northwest of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, on Thursday, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD – Five Iraqi soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol in Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Three policemen were wounded when a roadside bomb struck their patrol in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Two pilgrims walking to the Shi’ite holy city of Kerbala were killed and eight wounded by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad, police said.
alertnet.org

Bombs, bullets meet Shiite pilgrims in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Muslim pilgrims’ road to the holy city of Karbala was a highway of bullets and bombs for Shiites on Friday.

Drive-by shootings and roadside and bus bombs killed or injured 19 people, ratcheting up the sectarian tensions gripping Iraq.

Security forces, including U.S. armored reinforcements, girded for more bloodshed leading up to Monday’s Shiite holiday. And north of Baghdad, in the Sunni Triangle, a two-day-old operation involving 1,500 U.S. and Iraqi troops swept through an area near Samarra in search of insurgents.

It was in Samarra that the insurgent bombing of a Shiite shrine last month ignited days of violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. More than 500 people died.

Authorities had feared new attacks as tens of thousands of Shiites, many dressed in black and carrying religious banners, converge on Karbala, 50 miles south of the capital, for Monday’s 40th and final day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson.

The U.S. military announced this week it was dispatching a fresh battalion of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, about 700 troops, to Iraq from its base in Kuwait to provide extra security for Shiite holy cities and Baghdad during this period.

Friday’s bloodshed in Baghdad began as groups of faithful, many of them parents with children in tow, trekked down city streets headed for the southbound highway to Karbala.

Four U.S. Soldiers Die, Four Others Wounded in Explosion in Iraq

03/18/06 “The Independent” — — It is a bright winter morning and I am sipping my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a radar beam over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that dominates the minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In post-invasion, post-Judith Miller mode, the American press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war. So the story beneath the headline “In a Battle of Wits, Iraq’s Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of US” deserves to be read. Or does it?

Datelined Washington – an odd city in which to learn about Iraq, you might think – its opening paragraph reads: “Despite the recent arrest of one of his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq, insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, US authorities say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering operation than they do.”

Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis – along, I have to admit, with myself – have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that al-Qai’da’s Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of “insurgency mastermind”, the words that caught my eye were “US authorities say”. And as I read through the report, I note how the Los Angeles Times sources this extraordinary tale. I thought American reporters no longer trusted the US administration, not after the mythical weapons of mass destruction and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. Of course, I was wrong.
informationclearinghouse.info

Saddam Was Trying to Capture Zarqawi
The Bush administration repeatedly made the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab Zarqawi a pretext for invading the country and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They implied that he was a client of Saddam and that Saddam had arranged for hospital care for him.

Newly released documents from the captured Iraqi archives show that Saddam had put out an APB for Zarqawi and was trying to have him arrested as a danger to the Baath regime!

‘ However, one of the documents, a letter from an Iraqi intelligence official, dated August 17, 2002, asked agents in the country to be on the lookout for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and another unnamed man whose picture was attached. ‘

The September 29, 2002 Denver Post paraphrased Cheney, “He said the evidence presented against Iraq will be long and persuasive, including more details of a relationship between Hussein’s forces and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.”

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Middle East policy is not in America’s national interest and is motivated primarily by the country’s pro-Israel lobby, according to a study published yesterday by researchers from Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Observers in Washington said yesterday that the study was liable to stir up a tempest and spur renewed debate about the function of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby. The Fatah office in Washington distributed the article to an extensive mailing list.

“No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical,” write the authors of the study.

John J. Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago’s political science department and Stephen M. Walt from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government do not present new facts. They rely mainly on an analysis of Israeli and American newspaper reports and studies, along with the findings of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

The study also documents accusations that American supporters of Israel pushed the United States into war with Iraq. It lists senior Bush administration officials who supported the war and are also known to support Israel, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and David Wurmser. The authors say the influence of the pro-Israel lobby is a source of serious concern and write that it has even caused damage to Israel by preventing it from reaching a compromise with its neighbors.
haaretz.com

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) – Up to 200,000 Algerians have died in a 15-year Islamic insurgency, the head of the government human rights body said Saturday – the highest official toll ever given.

The fighting started in 1992 when the army canceled a second round of voting in Algeria’s first multiparty legislative elections, to thwart a likely victory by the now-banned Islamic Salvation Front.

Between 150,000 and 200,000 had died since the violence began, Farouk Ksentini said.

The number killed has never been clear, but Ksentini’s figure was the highest estimated toll given by anyone representing the state. The dead also included security forces, he said.
guardian.co.uk

American liberals, even left-liberals, just don’t get United States (U.S.) imperialism.

For an excellent case in point, see a recent opinion-editorial titled “Stop Bush’s War” by Bob Herbert, who is probably the “liberal” New York Times’ leftmost columnist (Hebert, “Stop Bush’s War, New York Times, 16 March 2006, p. A23).

The column makes some excellent points. Herbert is right to say that “an ocean of blood has been shed” in the criminal occupation of Iraq whether the total Iraqi body count is as low as president Bush says (30,000) or (as numerous responsible investigators say) well into six figures.

Herbert is right to say that “there’s no end to this tragic [blood] flow in sight.” He’s right to observe that many of the war’s supporters hold a fundamentally “deprav[ed]” thought: “that the best way to fight [the current Iraq war] is with other people’s children.” He’s right to remind us of “the formerly healthy men and women who have come back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed or without their arms or legs or eyes or the full use of their minds.” He’s right to quote David Halberstam to the effect that U.S. foreign policymakers’ desire to be seen as “tough” and “strong” is part of the reason for the continuing bloodshed in Iraq.

But Herbert is wrong to call “Bush’s war” “mindless” and to see little more than the timeless “madness” and “folly” of blind and power-mad elites in the making of both the U.S. assault on Vietnam and the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. He’s wrong to think it is telling, relevant, and useful to quote Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era special assistant Jack Valenti on “how difficult it is ‘to impress democracy’ on other countries.” He’s wrong to take the Bush administration seriously when it says it wants a free and democratic Iraq, as he does when he says that “the democracy that was supposed to flower in Iraq and then spread throughout the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass destruction.”

The notion that the White House wants “democracy in Iraq and the Middle East” has never been anything more than a childish fairly tale concocted to cover imperial machinations. Herbert is engaging in wildly wishful thinking and whistling in the wind of imperial arrogance when he says that “the White House should be working cooperatively with members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring the curtain down on U.S. involvement.”
zmag.org