BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 13 – With four months to go before nationwide elections in Iraq, the insurgency has grown more brazen and sophisticated, prompting American commanders to begin a series of military operations to regain control over large sections of the country lost in recent months
But as the Americans and their allies raise the pressure on the insurgents, they are rapidly finding themselves in the classic dilemma faced by governments battling guerrilla movements: ease up, and the insurgency may grow; crack down, and risk losing the support of the population. The additional quandary facing the Americans is the need to break the deadlock before January, the self-imposed deadline for elections.

On Sunday, insurgents struck the Americans and their allies in the Iraqi government in manifold ways: with suicide bombings, mortars and rockets, many of them showing a careful aim. Some of those attacks seemed intended not just to hurt the Americans but to provoke them into overreacting and alienating ordinary Iraqis.

How long the Americans can stick to their newly aggressive strategy is open to question: last April, as marines moved on Falluja, and Iraqi casualties soared into the hundreds, the Americans called off the attack and let a gang of insurgents take over.

Even now, the get-tough approach is showing signs of backfiring. On Sunday, when a suicide bomber crippled an American personnel carrier, a gun battle broke out, followed by an airstrike by two American helicopters. At least 15 Iraqis died and 50 were wounded, including a 12-year-old-girl and a television journalist. Inside the grim and chaotic wards of Baghdad’s hospitals on Sunday, the Americans seemed to have made more enemies than friends.

On Monday, the scene repeated itself in another corner of Baghdad. When three insurgents opened fire on an American sport utility vehicle, American soldiers sprayed the area with gunfire, destroying three cars and killing at least one Iraqi civilian and wounding three others.

“When the Americans fire back, they don’t hit the people who are attacking them, only the civilians,” said Osama Ali, a 24-year-old Iraqi who witnessed the attack. “This is why Iraqis hate the Americans so much. This is why we love the mujahedeen.”
Full Article: NY Times

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A huge car bomb ripped through a crowded market near a Baghdad police headquarters Tuesday, killing 47 people and wounding more than 110 in the deadliest single attack in Iraq’s capital in six months.

In Baquba northeast of Baghdad, gunmen opened fire on a police minibus, killing 12 people, and 10 Iraqis were killed in clashes between U.S. forces and guerrillas in the restive town of Ramadi, Health Ministry officials and witnesses said.

An Internet statement in the name of the Tawhid and Jihad group led by Jordanian al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the Baghdad blast, which it said was carried out by a suicide attacker. The group also claimed responsibility for the attack on the police minibus.

Fighting has surged in Iraq over the last few days after U.S.-led forces launched fierce offensives in a bid to retake pockets of the country that have fallen under guerrilla control and present problems in staging planned elections in January.

Gunmen opened fire on a U.S. patrol near Mosul, killing one soldier and wounding five, the U.S. military said.
Full Article: NY Times

by Patrick Cockburn
A plume of grey smoke billowed above Fallujah yesterday as the US military claimed they were making precision air strikes against insurgents in the city and local doctors said that civilians were being killed and wounded.

The US army said its warplanes had bombed houses because it had intelligence about the presence of fighters loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom the US sees as the guiding hand behind many attacks on its forces.

Dr Adel Khamis of the Fallujah General Hospital said at least 16 people were killed, including women and children, and 12 others were wounded. Video film showed a Red Crescent ambulance torn apart by an explosion. A hospital official said the driver, a paramedic and five patients had been killed by the blast.

“The conditions here are miserable – an ambulance was bombed, three houses destroyed and men and women killed,” said Rafayi Hayad al-Esawi, the director of the hospital. “The American army has no morals.”

Full Article: Independent UK

by Kim Sengupta
Laotian forces have been accused of raping, disembowelling and murdering children belonging to the minority Hmong tribe in a campaign of state-sponsored terror.

The human rights group Amnesty International says that the attacks, allegedly carried out three months ago, constituted war crimes and violations of international humanitarian laws by the Laos government.

The group says it has credible evidence that “scores of civilians, mainly children” were killed by troops or later died from their injuries, lack of medical aid and starvation.

In one incident, up to 40 Laotian soldiers were said to have been responsible for mutilating and killing five children aged from 13 to 16. Four of the victims, who were girls, were “apparently raped before being killed”.

The soldiers are said to have found the children, belonging to a community which supposedly supported rebels fighting the country’s Marxist government, foraging for food in the jungle. Others in the group managed to escape, but some were wounded by shots fired by troops

Full Article: Independent UK

Bush, the Neo-Cons and 9/11
by Robert Jensen

I’m a former full-time journalist turned journalism professor. I continue to commit occasional acts of journalism, and I retain a deep affection for, and commitment to, the craft and its ideals. That’s why it pains me to say this: The performance of the U.S. corporate commercial news media after 9/11 has been the most profound and dangerous failure of journalism in my lifetime.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the void is being filled by other institutions, including the Media Education Foundation with its new documentary, “Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire.”

That performance of journalists in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was so abysmal that the country’s top two daily newspapers, the Washington Post and New York Times, eventually were forced to engage in a bit of self-criticism, albeit shallow and inadequate. The U.S. news media’s willingness to serve as a largely uncritical conduit for the lies, half-truths, and distortions the Bush administration used to create the pretext for war showed how easily journalists can become de facto agents of a state propaganda campaign, which in this case mobilized public support for an illegal war.

But the lies that led to the Iraq War are only part of a bigger story, the most important story of the past three years: The Bush administration’s manipulation of the tragedy of 9/11 to extend and intensify the longstanding U.S. project of empire building (and the complicity of most Democrats in that endeavor).

No publication or network in the mainstream of U.S. journalism has offered an independent, critical analysis of that project. Only a few journalists, mostly on the margins, have even dared to take a crack at it. The best consistent work has been in the foreign press or the alternative media in the United States.

Full Article:counterpunch.org

hijackingcatastrophe.org

KARACHI, Pakistan (Reuters) – The international war on terror will prove a long drawn-out battle as militants reorganize themselves into smaller groups, Asian defense experts said Monday.

“Al Qaeda has broken its organization into smaller units of elements, making a network in third world nations,” Wan Usman, head of strategic studies at the University of Jakarta in Indonesia told a seminar on the changing global security environment.

The network had penetrated institutions, and managed to fan destructive radical anti-Western teachings in some Muslim schools in the region, he said.

Pakistan, a key ally of the United States in the war on terror, organized the seminar as part of an international defense exhibition that formally opens in Karachi Tuesday.

Full Article: Reuters

How helpful that our key ally Pakistan is organizing international seminars, expert that it is on the subject of terrorists, housing so many of them, maybe even, who knows, Osama himself. But the US can’t go invading Pakistan and Saudi now, can they? Those countries actually have armed forces, and Pakistan has nukes.

by Sabrina Tavernise
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 12 – In a series of tightly sequenced attacks, at least 25 Iraqis were killed by suicide car bombings and a barrage of missile and mortar fire in several neighborhoods across Baghdad on Sunday.

The attacks were the most widespread in months, seeming to demonstrate the growing power of the insurgency and heightening the sense of uncertainty and chaos in the capital at a time when American forces have already ceded control to insurgents in a number of cities outside of Baghdad.

The Associated Press reported that the total death toll throughout the country for the day reached 59, citing the Health Ministry and local authorities. Nearly 200 people were wounded, more than half of those in Baghdad.

Four suicide car bombings struck targets in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, with two of them detonating nearly simultaneously and one hitting just outside the gates of the Abu Ghraib prison.

In Baghdad, American military helicopters fired at Iraqis who were scaling a burning American armored vehicle. It was unclear how many Iraqis were killed in the airstrike. At least one television journalist was confirmed dead, and photographs immediately after the strike showed a group of four men severely wounded or dead at the site. American military commanders said the helicopters were returning fire aimed at them from the ground.

American forces appear to be facing a guerrilla insurgency that is more sophisticated and more widespread than ever before. Last month, attacks on American forces reached their highest level since the war began, an average of 87 per day.
Full Article: NY Times

When the Food and Drug Administration opens an advisory committee hearing tomorrow into the safety of antidepressants, several committee members will push for tougher warnings saying that a child or teenager given the drugs can become suicidal in the first weeks of therapy, they said in interviews.

“I want the warning strengthened,” said Dr. Richard Gorman, a member of the committee and a pediatrician from Ellicott City, Md. “I would also like the pharmaceutical companies to send out letters to doctors saying that, in kids, this stuff doesn’t work.”

Dr. James McGough, another committee member and a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, also said he wanted stronger warnings.

For more than a year, agency officials have struggled to find the appropriate balance between warning patients about the possible suicide risk of antidepressants and reassuring those patients that drug therapy can be an effective and safe remedy.

Full Article: NY Times

by Patrick Cockburn
The US military assault on Tal Afar, an ethnically Turkmen city in northern Iraq, has provoked a furious reaction from the Turkish government which is demanding the US call off the attack.

American and Iraqi government forces last week sealed off Tal Afar, a city west of Mosul belonging to Iraq’s embattled Turkmen minority. The US said it killed 67 insurgents while a Turkmen leader claims 60 civilians were killed and 100 wounded. The massive and indiscriminate use of US firepower in built-up areas, leading to heavy civilian casualties in cities like Tal Afar, Fallujah and Najaf, is coming under increasing criticism in Iraq. The US “came into Iraq like an elephant astride its war machine,” said Ibrahim Jaafari, the influential Iraqi Vice President.

The Americans claim that Tal Afar is a hub for militants smuggling fighters and arms into Iraq from nearby Syria. Turkish officials make clear in private they believe that the Kurds, the main ally of the US in northern Iraq, have managed to get US troops involved on their side in the simmering ethnic conflict between Kurds and Turkmen.

“The Iraqi government forces with the Americans are mainly Kurdish,” complained one Turkmen source. A Turkish official simply referred to the Iraqi military units involved in the attack on Tal Afar as “peshmerga”, the name traditionally given to Kurdish fighters.

The US army account of its aims in besieging Tal Afar is largely at odds with that given by Turkmen and may indicate that its officers are at sea in the complex ethnic mosaic of Iraq. The US says that in recent weeks the city was taken over by anti-American militants who repeatedly attacked US and Iraqi government forces.

“Tal Afar is a tribal city and its people were not patient with the presence of American forces,” said Farouq Abdullah Abdul Rahman, the president of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, in Baghdad yesterday. He agreed that there was friction with US forces but denied that anything justified the siege, with many Turkmen close to the front line fleeing into the countryside. “More than 60 people have been killed, including women and children, and 100 wounded.”

There has been tension, sometimes boiling over into gun battles, between the Kurds and the Turkmens since last year. As Saddam Hussein’s regime fell apart Kurdish troops, aided by the US air force, advanced to take Kirkuk and Mosul. The Kurds felt they at last had a chance to reverse 40 years of ethnic cleansing which had seen their people massacred or driven from their homes.

Full Article: commondreams.org

Turkey Threatens to End U.S. Cooperation Article: Guardian UK

Ah well another stupid hatchet-job on Cornel West. We loved him better when he was more ‘middle of the road,’ when he didn’t speak with pain about Israel, when he limited ‘nihilism’ to blacks…The only ‘whining’ here is that of the author of this dreadful review.

by Caleb Crain
Of democratic ideals, Cornel West asks rhapsodically ”how can we not fall in love with them if and when we are exposed to them?”

Actually, I can imagine resistance. Democracy is unpleasant and hard work. It isn’t enough to hold the right opinion. You have to speak to those who hold what you believe to be the wrong opinion in such a way as to convince them. Who wants to convince a horde of greedy, fearful, television-watching philistines they ought to give up their fantasies of strength and righteousness? Who volunteers to take the lamb carcass from the hyena? Let’s just go back inside and whine about how terrible hyenas are. Unfortunately, whining about the hyenas is, for the most part, what occupies West in ”Democracy Matters.” I agree with his sense that ”we have reached a rare fork in the road in American history.” But I am not sure this book will be much help.

In this it is unlike his 1993 best seller, ”Race Matters.” There he appealingly combined the style of a radical intellectual with a message that was middle-of-the-road. Writing in the aftermath of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles triggered by the Rodney King verdict, West was concerned about what he called black nihilism — ”the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness and social despair so widespread in black America.” He felt that the psychology of despair was a better way of explaining the black predicament than either ”liberal structuralism” (i.e., blame socioeconomic conditions) or ”conservative behaviorism” (i.e., blame lapses in morals). West’s language had a Marxian flavor, but his answer was predominantly Christian: he proposed a ”politics of conversion.” And he seemed uninterested in playing the race card. He made a point of disowning misogynist and anti-Semitic strains in black political culture, unsqueamishly contemplated black and black-and-white sexuality and criticized what he called the ”closing-ranks mentality” threatening to homogenize black political thought.

In ”Democracy Matters,” which he calls a sequel, West worries that nihilism has now spread to Americans of all races. ”Many have given up even being heard,” he writes, and have succumbed to ”sour cynicism, political apathy and cultural escapism.” West’s political insights tend to come in threes. American democracy, he feels, is threatened by ”free-market fundamentalism,” ”aggressive militarism” and ”escalating authoritarianism.” It will be saved, if it can be, by recourse to ”the Socratic commitment to questioning,” ”the prophetic commitment to justice” and ”tragicomic hope.” West believes that in the fight against imperialism, the black experience may be a crucial resource, because blacks relied on tragicomic hope in their struggle for freedom, and it remains legible in their history and audible in black music, from the blues to hip-hop.

New York Times Book Review
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