AMMAN (Reuters) – Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein appealed to Iraqis from his prison cell to unite against what he called U.S. efforts to sow sectarian divisions, his lawyers said on Sunday.

Ziad Khasawneh, a Jordanian lawyer and spokesman for Saddam’s defense team, told reporters: “President Saddam Hussein urged the unity of his Iraqi people, regardless of their religious and ethnic creed, to confront U.S. plans to divide their country on sectarian grounds.”

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Saddam relayed his messages through Khalil Dulaimi, an Iraqi lawyer and member of the defense counsel who met the ousted leader for more than four hours on Thursday — Saddam’s first access to lawyers since he was arrested a year ago.

Dulaimi’s identity was until Sunday kept secret by Saddam’s Amman-based legal team for fears over his life after he escaped an assassination attempt two weeks ago, defense lawyers said.

Saddam, who is denied access to news, was eager to know what had happened in Iraq since his captivity, Khasawneh said.

Saddam said Iraqis had to be cautious after Dulaimi told him U.S.-backed elections would take place next month, said Lebanese lawyer Bushra al-Khalil, who is on the defense team.

But the former strongman was as defiant as ever and high-spirited in captivity, his lawyers said.

“If my commitment to my principles was 90 percent before the U.S. invasion then after what happened to me it’s 100 percent firm,” Khasawneh quoted Saddam as saying.

Saddam sent a plea to Iraq’s men of religion from all persuasions to “shoulder a historic responsibility” in rallying people in Iraq’s difficult times, the lawyers said.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Bush threatened on Monday to use new economic and diplomatic measures to pressure Syria over its suspected interference in Iraq before January elections.

“We have sent messages to the Syrians in the past and we will continue to do so. We have tools at our disposal — a variety of tools, ranging from diplomatic tools to economic pressure. Nothing’s taken off the table,” Bush told a news conference.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Iraq bombers ‘linked to Iran and Syria’
The Iraqi authorities arrested 50 suspects yesterday in connection with the suicide bombs that killed 67 people and injured 175 in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

Claims by the police that some of those arrested had confessed to having links with Iranian and Syrian intelligence agencies will not sound convincing to Shia Iraqis who believe that the bombings were the work of Sunni fundamentalists.

Iraqis are now beginning to ask if they are slipping towards conflict between the country’s Shia and Sunni communities. Walid al-Omar, a businessman from Basra in the Shia-dominated south, said: “The feelings of each community are becoming polarised. They have not quite reached boiling point yet but they might do so in future.”
Full Article: independent.co.uk

by Reed Lindsay
At first the smoke billowing from the national penitentiary in the Haitian capital seemed of no consequence.

On 1 December, US Secretary of State Colin Powell was visiting Haitian President Boniface Alexandre. The UN peacekeeping force in the capital, Port-au-Prince, was preoccupied with guarding the national palace where Powell’s visit was taking place. But meanwhile, in the prison, something terrible was unfolding.

According to official reports, prisoners in a three-storey cell block called ‘Titanic’ had rioted, breaking free from their cells, setting fire to mattresses and brandishing water pipes as weapons. Prison guards called in a special police unit to help put down the uprising, and officials later said that seven prisoners had been killed and more than 40 detainees and guards wounded during the fracas.

But according to prisoners and others interviewed by The Observer, this is a woeful understatement. The government, they say, is concealing a savage bloodbath in which dozens of detainees were killed by police and guards.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Senior army commanders have expressed fears that the increasingly vocal anti-Iraq war movement is discouraging thousands of young men from considering a career in the armed forces.

They blame high-profile campaigns against the war, often led by bereaved parents and supported by celebrities and political figures, for worsening recruitment problems, particularly into the infantry.

According to military sources the high media visibility of bereaved parents, such as Rose Gentle, whose 19-year-old son was killed, and the unpopularity of the war have made recruitment and retention a problem, exacerbating an already acute recruitment crisis in areas such as Scotland. The problem is now also spreading to the north of England and Wales, forces officials say.

As well as a shortfall in young men volunteering, army officers have reported a wider reluctance to support a career in the army with parents refusing to sign consent forms for junior soldiers to sign up and, in some cases, local authorities with a strong anti-war sentiment refusing permission for recruitment officers to put up stands at local venues.

According to army sources the problem is also evident in the Territorial Army which has bolstered the regular Army’s ranks in Iraq.

‘People join the Territorials for a hobby,’ said another source. ‘They don’t expect to end up being sent to Iraq for six months, taking casualties and seeing a lot of killing. There is no end in sight to the war in Iraq. That is what is really putting people off.’

The impact of the anti-war movement has also made itself apparent in the United States, where there has been a sharp decline in volunteers from communities – such as the black community – that have traditionally supplied soldiers. In the US this has been tied to a sharp increase in desertions – a problem so far not seen in the UK.

One senior source confirmed: ‘The anti-war movement is exacerbating our recruitment problems.’
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

hahahaha. Yeah, between that pesky anti-war movement with its whining mothers, and those darned Iraqis defending their country, people are getting the wrong idea about the military…

by Marc Cooper
First the L.A. Times helped kill off Gary Webb’s career. Then, eight years later, after Webb committed suicide this past weekend, the Times decided to give his corpse another kick or two, in a scandalous, self-serving and ultimately shameful obituary. It was the culmination of the long, inglorious saga of a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out-of-town reporter who embarrassed it.

Webb was the 49-year-old former Pulitzer-winning reporter who in 1996, while working for the San Jose Mercury News, touched off a national debate with a three-part series that linked the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras to a crack-dealing epidemic in Los Angeles and other American cities.

A cold panic set in at the L.A. Times when Webb’s so-called Dark Alliance story first appeared. Just two years before, the Times had published a long takeout on local crack dealer Rickey Ross and no mention was made of his possible link to and financing by CIA-backed Contras. Now the Times feared it was being scooped in its own backyard by a second-tier Bay Area paper.

The Times mustered an army of 25 reporters, led by Doyle McManus, to take down Webb’s reporting. It was, apparently, more important to the Times to defend its own inadequate reporting on the CIA-drug connection than it was to advance Webb’s important work (a charge consistently denied by the Times). The New York Times and the Washington Post also joined in on the public lynching of Webb. Webb’s own editor, Jerry Ceppos, also helped do him in, with a public mea culpa backing away from his own papers stories.

Webb was further undermined by some of his own most fervent supporters. With the help of demagogues like Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a conspiracy-theory hysteria was whipped up that used Webb’s series as “proof” that the CIA was more or less single-handedly responsible for South-Centrals crack plague – a gross distortion of Webb’s work.

But that conspiracy theory played perfectly into the hands of the L.A. Times. When its own three-day series appeared a few months later – attempting to demolish Webb – the Times disproved a number of points that were never made by Webb, primarily that the CIA consciously engaged in a program to spread the use of crack.

The Times’ Washington-based reporter McManus, who spent most of the late ’80s and early ’90s as one of the less-curious fourth-estate stenographers to the Reagan/Bush administrations, relied principally on CIA sources to vindicate the CIA in the anti-Webb series. Citing a “former CIA official” named Vince Cannistraro, McManus wrote that “CIA officials insist they knew nothing” about the Contra-drug dealers named by Webb. Cannistraro, however, was more fit to be a subject of the Times investigation than a source. Over the length of the Times series it was never mentioned that Cannistraro had actually been in charge of the CIA-Contra operation in the early ’80s, that is, before moving on to help supervise the covert program of CIA-backed Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan (who themselves were, and continue to be, knee-deep in the heroin trade).
Full Article: alternet.org

by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON — Just when it appeared that Syria was complying in earnest with U.S. demands to secure its border with Iraq and even making unprecedented peace overtures to Israel, key neo-conservative opinion shapers are calling on President George W Bush to take stronger measures against Damascus, possibly including military action.

The media campaign was launched last week, when three analysts associated with the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD), a neo-conservative group that generally backs positions of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, published an article in the ‘Washington Times’ titled ‘Syria’s Murderous Role: Assad Aides (sic) Iraq’s Terrorist Insurgency’.

Then William Kristol, the influential chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and editor of the Rupert Murdoch owned ‘Weekly Standard’, devoted his lead editorial, ‘Getting Serious About Syria’, to the same subject, concluding that, despite the stresses on the U.S. military in Iraq, ”real options exist (for dealing with Damascus)”.

”We could bomb Syrian military facilities; we could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we could occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles from the border, which seems to be the planning and organising centre for Syrian activities in Iraq; we could covertly help or overtly support the Syrian opposition…”

On Wednesday the ‘Wall Street Journal’ followed up in its lead editorial — always a reliable indicator of neo-con opinion on the Middle East — charging, ”Syria is providing material support to terrorist groups killing American soldiers in Iraq while openly calling on Iraqis to join the ‘resistance’.”

The editorial, ‘Serious About Syria’? accused the Bush administration of responding to these provocations with ”mixed political signals and weak gestures”, and urged it to at least threaten military action, much as Turkey ”mobilised for war against Syria” in 1998 over Damascus’ support for Kurdish rebels.

Within hours, Bush himself was talking tough on Damascus. Asked during a White House photo-op with visiting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi about accusations by Iraq’s defence minister of alleged Syrian and Iranian support for the Sunni insurgency, the president warned the two countries that ”meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is not in their interest”
Full Articles: commondreams.org

by Clayton Hirst
The British government, while publicly supporting the efforts of Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons, is secretly backing US plans to remove him.

The US State Department and the CIA were last week reported to have tapped phone conversations with Iranian officials by Dr ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in an attempt to gather information that could discredit him.

The Bush administration believes that Dr ElBaradei is taking too soft a line on Iran. In public Britain is closer to the IAEA position than Washington’s: with Germany and France, it has led an EU initiative to persuade Iran to freeze its nuclear development. While the US refuses to rule out the use of force, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has described bombing Iran’s facilities as “inconceivable”.

It had been assumed that Britain was also well-disposed towards Dr ElBaradei, who has said he plans to seek a third term next year as IAEA chief, but a well-placed Whitehall source revealed that officials had secretly backed US moves to replace him. The Foreign Office gave its support to the plan weeks ago, and the Department of Trade and Industry, in charge of Britain’s nuclear regulation, was also behind the move, according to the source.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

by Geoffrey Lean
Governments from around the world yesterday narrowly succeeded in keeping the international bid to combat catastrophic global warming alive, in the face of determined attempts by the re-elected Bush administration to kill it off.

Top negotiators described the effort – at a special UN conference in Buenos Aires – as like hanging on to a cliff face by their “fingernails”, as the United States and oil-producing countries threw rock after rock to try to dislodge them.

More than 36 hours after the conference was supposed to have ended – following two all-night negotiating sessions, and while workmen were physically dismantling the facilities around them – delegates finally agreed on a series of compromises that avoided complete breakdown and kept some life in the negotiations.

The US said that “on balance” it was “very pleased with the outcome”, but its obdurate obstruction of even anodyne proposals at the two-week conference bodes ill for the future of the talks, which are designed to hammer out the next tough steps to be taken after the Kyoto Protocol runs its course in 2012.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

by Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi election on 30 January, for which campaigning began last week, will be one of the most secretive in history. Iraqi television shows only the feet of election officials rather than their faces, because they are terrified of their identity being revealed. It will be a poll governed by fear.

Those fears were amply borne out yesterday when insurgents launched attacks on election offices in northern Iraq. Two people were killed and eight wounded when mortars landed on an election office in Dujail, one of many around the country registering and educating potential voters. Two Iraqis were killed in execution-style shootings and four American contractors were wounded by a roadside bomb in other incidents.

When Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, announced his slate of candidates for the 275-member National Assembly in Baghdad last week, it was to a small audience of American security guards. The venue had been changed at the last minute to baffle potential assassins, and foreign journalists deemed it too dangerous to attend.

Shopkeepers distributed registration forms, tucked into the bags of monthly rations on which most Iraqis depend for survival. In Sunni districts in Baghdad some shopkeepers, fearing execution by the resistance, had begged their customers not to reveal where they got the forms.

…Few votes will be cast in the Sunni cities, towns and villages strung along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers north of Baghdad. Even if voters did want to go to the polls, it would be extremely dangerous to do so in places where anybody seen co-operating with the US is a target.

American and British officials persistently underestimate the extent to which all of Iraq is unstable. President George Bush and Tony Blair genuinely appear to believe that there are only limited trouble spots in Iraq and the rest of the country is at peace. Since the beginning of the insurgency, Washington and London have portrayed it as confined to the so-called “Sunni triangle” west and north of Baghdad. The phrase is designed to minimise the extent of the uprising, but in reality there is guerrilla warfare in all the Sunni towns and cities as well as Baghdad.

As US generals were issuing triumphant claims of victory in Fallujah, with a population of 300,000, last month they lost control of Mosul, 250 miles to the north, with a population of 1.2 million. The unexpected insurgent uprising on 10 November, which led to the disintegration of the 8,000-strong police force, was clearly planned to take advantage of the US assault on Fallujah on 8 November.

In the most militant cities there is no sign of insurgent activity diminishing: Every day there are attacks on US and interim government forces in Baiji, Baquba, Ramadi, Samarra and Tal Afar. Fallujah itself is far from subdued. Ayham al-Samarrai, the minister of electricity, told The Independent on Sunday that it would be difficult to hold fair elections in provinces with a total population of eight million – a third of the Iraqi population.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

Amputation rate for US troops twice that of past wars
Boston Globe
US troops injured in Iraq have required limb amputations at twice the rate of past wars, and as many as 20 percent have suffered head and neck injuries that may require a lifetime of care, according to new data giving the clearest picture yet of the severity of battlefield wounds.

The data are the grisly flip side of improvements in battlefield medicine that have saved many combatants who would have died in the past: Only 1 in 10 US troops injured in Iraq has died, the lowest rate of any war in US history.

But those who survive have much more grievous wounds. Bulletproof Kevlar vests protect soldiers’ bodies but not their limbs, as insurgent snipers and makeshift bombs tear off arms and legs and rip into faces and necks. More than half of those injured sustain wounds so serious they cannot return to duty, according to Pentagon statistics.
Full Article: boston.com

Losing Control
by Paul Rogers
The United States assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004, launched just after the American presidential election, was intended to break the back of the insurgency in Iraq. It was heralded by assertions that Fallujah was out of control, that it had become a central logistics base for the insurgency across much of central and northern Iraq, and – not least – that the subjugation of Fallujah would be an essential prerequisite to the Iraqi elections planned for 30 January 2005.

The Fallujah operation was followed almost immediately by vigorous military action against insurgents in other towns and villages in central Iraq. United States strategists, while not persuaded that the taking of Fallujah would bring the insurgency to an immediate end, believed that these actions as a whole would be a decisive turning-point in a war that would otherwise soon be heading towards its third year.

Routes of turmoil

It is now clear that the reality in central Iraq is radically different from these American projections and expectations (see last week’s column in this series, “No direction home”, 25 November 2004). There are five recent indicators of this, which together seem almost to model the developing dangers of the insurgency as a whole.

The first is an apparently minor change of policy reported on 3 December, concerning the route between Baghdad airport and the heavily-protected “green zone” that houses the Iraqi government and the thousands of American officials attached to the US embassy and other agencies. This twenty-kilometre road has now been deemed too dangerous for US government personnel to use. In future, they will be flown to and from the airport by helicopter (see Bradley Graham, “US Embassy Bans Us of Airport Road”, Washington Post, 3 December 2004).

The airport highway is nowhere near Fallujah, Ramadi, Samarra, Mosul or any other centre of insurgency; it runs through the heart of Baghdad. Yet it has been rendered unsafe, although around 1,000 troops from the US army’s 1st cavalry division have been guarding it.
Full Article: opendemocracy.net

Security Checks to Greet Fallujah’s Returning Residents
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Dec. 9 — When the residents of Fallujah begin trickling back to their devastated city, they will be routed through sandbagged checkpoints where U.S. and Iraqi troops will take their fingerprints, issue ID cards and in some cases scan their irises, part of an elaborate plan to keep insurgents out of the former radical militant stronghold.

The first residents to be allowed back in, possibly by Dec. 24, will be heads of households, according to Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, who outlined the plan Thursday. They will be permitted to survey damage to their houses during last month’s battle to retake the city and allowed to file claims for compensation.

Five checkpoints have been set up leading into Fallujah, with roads south of the city blocked by sand berms, said Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

All men of military age will be processed using a central database; they will be photographed, fingerprinted and have iris scans taken before being issued ID cards. The entire process should take about 10 minutes per man, Sattler said.

The system has been in use for several months in Iraq, but until now only to catalogue detainees.

No civilian vehicles will be permitted within city limits as a precaution against car bombs, which, along with roadside bombs, are the deadliest weapons in the insurgent arsenal, Sattler said. All cars will be left on the outskirts of Fallujah, and residents will be bused to their homes, district by district.

“Some may see this as a ‘Big Brother is watching over you’ experiment, but in reality it’s a simple security measure to keep the insurgents from coming back,” said Maj. Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
Full Article: washingtonpost.com

More… tomdispatch.com