HADITHA, Iraq – In the middle of methodically recalling the day his brother’s family was killed, Yaseen’s monotone voice and stream of tears suddenly stopped. He looked up, paused and pleaded: ”Please don’t let me say anything that will get me killed by the Americans. My family can’t handle any more.”

The story of what happened to Yaseen and his brother Younes’ family has redefined Haditha’s relationship with the Marines who patrol it. On Nov. 19, a roadside bomb struck a Humvee on Haditha’s main road, killing one Marine and injuring two others.
The Marines say they took heavy gunfire afterwards and thought it was coming from the area around Younes’ house. They went to investigate, and 23 people were killed.
Eight were from Younes’ family. The only survivor, Younes’ 13-year-old daughter, said her family wasn’t shooting at Marines or harboring extremists that morning. They were sleeping when the bomb exploded. And when the Marines entered their house, she said, they shot at everyone inside.

The Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) began an investigation in February after a Time Magazine reporter passed on accounts he had received about the incident. A second investigation was opened into how the Marines initially reported the killings – the Marines said that 15 people were killed by the roadside explosion and that eight insurgents were killed in subsequent combat.

On Friday, the Marines relieved of duty three leaders of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, which had responsibility for Haditha when the shooting occurred. They are Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and two of his company commanders, Capt. James S. Kimber and Capt. Lucas M. McConnell. McConnell was commanding Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, the unit that struck the roadside bomb on Nov. 19 and led the subsequent search of the area.
newspress.com

Al Qaeda in Iraq and its presumed leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, have conceded strategic defeat and are on their way out of the country, a top U.S. military official contended yesterday.

The group’s failure to disrupt national elections and a constitutional referendum last year “was a tactical admission by Zarqawi that their strategy had failed,” said Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commands the XVIII Airborne Corps.

“They no longer view Iraq as fertile ground to establish a caliphate and as a place to conduct international terrorism,” he said in an address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Gen. Vines’ statement came as news broke that coalition and Iraqi forces had killed an associate of Osama bin Laden’s during an early morning raid near Abu Ghraib about two weeks ago.

Rafid Ibrahim Fattah aka Abu Umar al Kurdi served as a liaison between terrorist networks and was linked to Taliban members in Afghanistan, Pakistani-based extremists and other senior al Qaeda leaders, the military said yesterday.

In the past six months, al Kurdi had worked as a terrorist cell leader in Baqouba. Prior to that, he had traveled extensively Pakistan, Iran and Iraq and formed a relationship with al Qaeda senior leaders in 1999 while in Afghanistan.

He also had ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, formed while he was in Iran and Pakistan, and joined the jihad in Afghanistan in 1989, the military said. He was killed March 27.

Gen. Vines said the foreign terrorists had made a strategic mistake when they tried to intimidate and deny Iraqis a way to vote.

“I believe Zarqawi discredited himself with the Iraqi people because of his willingness to slaughter Iraqi people,” he said.

Huthayafa Azzam, whose father was seen as a political mentor of bin Laden, told reporters in Jordan in early April that Zarqawi had been replaced as head of the terrorist fight in Iraq in an effort to put an Iraqi at the head of the organization.

Azzam said Zarqawi had “made many political mistakes,” including excessive violence and the bombing last November of a Jordanian hotel, and as a result was being “confined to military action.”

Gen. Vines, who from January 2005 to January 2006 led all coalition forces in Iraq, did not comment on those reports. But he did caution that although the foreign extremists were leaving Iraq “looking for more fertile ground,” they could come back.

“The question now is what kind of government is going to be formed and is it going to be credible,” he said, acknowledging that Iran had significant influence over Iraq’s religious Shi’ite population.

“Iran wants us out, but not too soon — after a Shi’ite government friendly to Iran is established,” Gen. Vines said. “Iran’s view is that the current government is not strong enough, and if we pulled out now, there would be a low-level civil war.”
washingtontimes.com

Too much. They’re packing their suitcases with heads hung in shame. ‘Strategic defeat’–yeah right. Now that we like Sunnis instead of Shia, this cartoon character, thrice-dead, one-eyed, one-legged all-purpose evil villain, has outlived its usefulness. Especially when even the likes of the Washinton Post is on to the scam and uttering the term ‘psy-ops.’ One good thing though: since he probably does not exist in the flesh, it’s easy to disappear him.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Dozens of Iraqi police officers were missing and feared dead Friday following an ambush of a motor vehicle convoy as incessant violence between the country’s Shiite Muslim majority and Sunni Arab minority marred the Muslim day of worship.

The Thursday night ambush, laden with sectarian overtones, was recounted in confusing and contradictory official accounts that have come to characterize much of the inter-communal violence in Iraq.

It occurred near a U.S. base north of the capital as about 80 officers of the Shiite-dominated police force headed back to a police academy in the southern city of Najaf after picking up new vehicles from a training center in Taji, a stronghold of the Sunni-led insurgency.

Iraqis rarely travel the country’s perilous roads at night, fearing bandits and insurgents. Maj. Gen. Abbas Karim, a police chief in Najaf, told reporters the convoy departed after U.S. officials refused to let the Iraqis spend the night at the base.
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, an American spokesman, said the military had “no indication that there ever was any request to stay at a U.S. base.”

The clash erupted between Iraqi police officers and suspected Sunni insurgents shortly after the convoy of 10 or so vehicles left the base.
detnews.com

Photographs From Iraq: March 22 – April 12, 2006

In an act of at least partial contrition, an officer in charge of the US military occupation of Babylon in 2003 and 2004 has offered to make a formal apology for the destruction his troops wrought on the ancient site.

Colonel John Coleman, former chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, said yesterday that if the head of the Iraqi antiquities board wanted an apology, “if it makes him feel good, we can certainly give him one”.

…But after entering Babylon in April 2003, coalition forces turned the site into a base camp, flattening and compressing tracts of ruins as they built a helicopter pad and fuel stations. The soldiers filled sandbags with archeological fragments and dug trenches through unexcavated areas, while tanks crushed slabs of original 2,600-year-old paving.
independent.co.uk

The question to the group of women delegates from Iraq was “What would you like to see come out of this meeting?”

I was not prepared either for the answer or for its explanation: “What we need now,” one of the Iraqi woman said, “is the end of the blood-letting. Women are very necessary to this operation. Fifty-five to 60 percent of Iraqis are women. The minority is ruling … Women must interfere in the affairs of men. We should take over.”

It was hardly a statement I expected to hear in this place from these women. But I couldn’t forget it.

“The minority is ruling.” Right. And not too well, it seems, either here or there.

When men sit down to negotiate peace treaties — when there’s even someone to negotiate with, which, given al-Qaeda, is not a luxury we seem to have anymore — they disband armies and guard borders and hold military tribunals and form new governments and punish old ones. But they put no faces on the victims.

When they tote up the cost of the war, they do not include the number of women raped, the number of families displaced, the number of schools bombed, or the number of babies without milk.

The victors take their spoils, monitor the guns, forget the defenseless and leave the people to clean up the rubble. War becomes the daily dirge of the anonymous victims.

But when you bring women together to discuss the effects of war, the things that need to be changed, the real problems of a war-torn society, the conversation takes a sudden turn.

At the first Iraqi-American dialogue convened by the Women’s Global Peace Initiative in New York on March 29, the differences were plain. The women’s first agenda did not concentrate on who did what or who profited or lost by the doing of it. “Take the oil. We don’t care about the oil,” one woman called across the room. “We never got any value from it anyway,” she went on. “Never mind yesterday,” another woman said in answer to the Sunni- Shi’ite tensions. “Forget who did what to whom. We must turn the page now. We must rebuild the country.”

“And what is the first thing that must be done to rebuild the country?” we asked them. I sat with my hands over the keyboard, sure that the list would be long and varied. I was wrong. To a woman, the call was clear: “Take care of our children.”

It was a sobering moment. Take care of our children. “Oh, them,” I thought. “The tiny, the forgotten, targets of this war.”
nationalcatholicreporter

Russia says it had promised emergency aid to the Palestinian Authority, breaking with the EU and Washington, which have stopped funding to try to force Hamas to recognise Israel.

A Foreign Ministry statement said on Saturday the offer came in a telephone conversation on Friday between Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president.

“Mahmoud Abbas highly appreciated the intention of Russia, confirmed by Lavrov, to grant the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority urgent financial aid in the nearest time,” it said.

Russia is a member of the Quartet of Middle East mediators searching for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with the UN, the EU and the US.

The US and the European Union have halted direct aid to the Palestinian Authority because it has not renounced violence, recognised Israel or agreed to abide by interim peace deals.

Washington has barred American citizens and organisations from most business dealings with the Palestinian Authority.

Israel has also blocked the transfer of customs and tax receipts.

Larvov had earlier criticised the halting of aid, though he has urged Hamas to meet the demands of international mediators.

He said the only way to make Hamas meet international demands was to work with it, not boycott it.

It was wrong to deny aid to the Palestinians “purely because in democratic elections they elected a government made up entirely out of Hamas members … we are convinced that this approach is mistaken”, Larvov was quoted as saying last Tuesday.
aljazeera.net

WASHINGTON – President Bush and the first lady paid about $187,000 in federal taxes this year on income of about $735,000. Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife made more than 10 times as much, overpaid the tax man and are looking for a $1.9 million refund.

…The Cheneys’ income included the vice president’s $205,031 government salary and $211,465 in deferred compensation from Halliburton Co., the Dallas-based energy services firm he headed until Aug. 16, 2000.

Cheney elected in December 1998 to recoup over five years a portion of the money he made in 1999 as chief executive officer of Halliburton. This amount was to be paid in annual installments — with interest — after Cheney’s retirement from Halliburton. The 2005 payment is the last.
news.yahoo.com

Federal authorities have decided to deport a former Florida professor and longtime Palestinian rights activist after failing to convict him on charges he helped finance terrorist attacks in Israel.

Sami Al-Arian, who had met with U.S. presidents and other political leaders before his terrorism indictment in 2003, reached an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to a lesser charge and be deported, two lawyers familiar with the case said Friday. The arrangement requires the approval of a judge.

It was not clear where Al-Arian would be sent.

…The case against Al-Arian was once hailed by authorities as a triumph of the anti-terror Patriot Act, which allowed secret wiretaps and other information gathered by intelligence agents to be used in criminal prosecutions.

Al-Arian and three co-defendants were charged with running a North American cell of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian had been under FBI surveillance at least since the mid-1990s.

But at the end of a five-month trial, jurors said the mountain of intercepted phone calls and other materials did not directly link Al-Arian and the others to violent acts, specifically a terrorist attack in 1995 that killed seven Israelis and American Alisa Flatow.

A Palestinian who was born in Kuwait, Al-Arian has lived in the United States for 30 years and holds permanent residency status. He was raised mostly in Egypt.

He had been a computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida but was fired after his indictment. He has been held without bail for more than three years.
sfgate.com

An economics professor from California who was arrested because a flight attendant thought she looked like a terrorist has been awarded $27.5m (£15.7m).

In a victory for critics of racial profiling, a jury in El Paso, Texas, ordered Southwest Airlines to pay damages to Samantha Carrington for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution after she was bundled off a flight and arrested because flight attendants found her appearance suspicious.
guardian.co.uk

Donald Rumsfeld was directly linked to prisoner abuse for the first time yesterday, when it emerged he had been “personally involved” in a Guantánamo Bay interrogation found by military investigators to have been “degrading and abusive”.

Human Rights Watch last night called for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate whether the defence secretary could be criminally liable for the treatment of Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi al-Qaida suspect forced to wear women’s underwear, stand naked in front of a woman interrogator, and to perform “dog tricks” on a leash, in late 2002 and early 2003. The US rights group said it had obtained a copy of the interrogation log, which showed he was also subjected to sleep deprivation and forced to maintain “stress” positions; it concluded that the treatment “amounted to torture”.

However, military investigators decided the interrogation did not amount to torture but was “abusive and degrading”. Those conclusions were made public last year but this is the first time Mr Rumsfeld’s own involvement has emerged.
According to a December report by the army inspector general, obtained by Salon.com online magazine, the investigators did not accuse the defence secretary of specifically prescribing “creative” techniques, but they said he regularly monitored the progress of the al-Kahtani interrogation by telephone, and they argued he had helped create the conditions that allowed abuse to take place.
guardian.co.uk

Gee if Human Rights Watch wants to get rid of Rumsfeld…google George Soros.