Billo_Really

"Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?"

This thread is for anyone that cares to post news or comments originating outside mainstream US media outlets. This thread is for the news you do not hear about. To be truly fair and balanced, we must embrace both sides and all points of view. It is not the point of this thread to trash America. Taking all news story's with a grain of salt is prudent. However, getting news from alternate sources gives us a better understanding of the truth. We have it pretty good here in the US. And sometimes, we are unable to process (or understand) the suffering of others, while watching images on TV that infer reality. When in reality, everything we see on TV, we are meant to see! Truth will come in many forms. It is up to the reader to decide when.

The following article gives the reader a "words-eye" view of Iraq today from the people that live there. You won't see this on Fox News!

Iraq rebuilding fails to deliver
By Jon Leyne
BBC correspondent in Baghdad

On the outskirts of Baghdad, workmen have been toiling frantically to repair a huge broken water main.
It was blown up by insurgents at the weekend. They knew exactly where to place the charge for maximum damage. It has taken out the water supply for more than half of Baghdad.

"We've been affected badly," complained one man in the area. "We don't have any water to drink. What are we supposed to do? Sometimes they cut the power as well. It's all the fault of the Americans."

It is typical of the frustration faced by the Americans and their allies, as they struggle to improve the quality of life in Iraq.

Figures from the US aid agency US-Aid show that Iraq is generating more electricity now than when Saddam Hussein was in power. But that us not the impression for most Iraqis as they suffer another sweltering summer with only intermittent power.

Unbearable heat

Nothing has changed, maybe it's worse. Life is very hard
Trainee seamstress

At the moment in Baghdad, the power is off for four hours, then on for only two. Even those lucky enough to own generators struggle to find the power to run vital air conditioning units.
In the southern city of Basra there were protests about the situation this week.

The temperature there can rise to 50C with 98% humidity. It can be almost unbearable.

The Iraq budget for US-Aid alone, since the downfall of Saddam Hussein, has been more than $5bn. But most Iraqis simply have not seen a difference.

On one job creation project, there is a budget of $88m. It has paid for a series of training centres, like one I visited in the impoverished Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad.
I found trainers teaching Iraqis computer skills. In another room, two classes of women were learning to use Chinese-made sewing machines.

They are popular classes. But the day I visited, nothing was moving. The power was down once again.

Stark prospects

The staff admit they only expect to find jobs for half the people they train.

"Nothing has changed, maybe it's worse. Life is very hard," said one of the women learning to sew.

Rime and her husband Saad work for the contractors who are carrying out the training.

I asked Rime if life was getting any better, two years after the fall of Saddam.

"No it's not, that's the truth" she said. "But we cannot submit to the situation.
"There are some jobs, there are some companies defying the security situation and trying to get things started. And Iraqis are very supportive to such companies."

Rime and Saad know they are putting their lives in danger, just by working on a US-financed project.

"It is dangerous," said Saad. "But one way or another we have to do it. If I believe in something I have to continue doing it."

Little to show

The Americans and their allies point to the steady political progress - the handover of sovereignty, elections, the formation of a government, and now talks on the writing of a new constitution.

The hope was that a new, legitimate, government, would isolate the insurgents and win the support of moderates in all communities.

The trouble is, that has just not happened. If anything the violence continues to increase.

In the last few days, for example, more than 40 Iraqis have been killed in bomb attacks against police trainees, and at a Baghdad restaurant.

It has become so commonplace the rest of the world hardly notices any more.

Remarkably, Iraqis have not lost hope that things will improve. But so far, despite billions of dollars spent in Iraq, there is very little to show for it.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...st/4118628.stm

Published: 2005/06/22 10:40:30 GMT

© BBC MMV

__________________

"With neocons, it just goes to show, when the
bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong!"

vandree

West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work
From James Hider in Baghdad




IRAQI security forces, set up by American and British troops, torture detainees by pulling out their fingernails, burning them with hot irons or giving them electric shocks, Iraqi officials say. Cases have also been recorded of bound prisoners being beaten to death by police.
In their haste to put police on the streets to counter the brutal insurgency, Iraqi and US authorities have enlisted men trained under Saddam Hussein’s regime and versed in torture and abuse, the officials told The Times. They said that recruits were also being drawn from the ranks of outlawed Shia militias.



Counter-insurgencies are rarely clean fights, but Iraq’s dirty war is being waged under the noses of US and British troops whose mission is to end the abuses of the former dictatorship. Instead, they appear to have turned a blind eye to the constant reports of torture from Iraq’s prisons.

Among the worst offenders cited are the Interior Ministry police commandos, a force made up largely of former army officers and special forces soldiers drawn from the ranks of Saddam’s dissolved army. They are seen as the most effective tool the coalition has in fighting the insurgency.

“It’s a gruesome situation we are in,” a senior Iraqi official said. “You have to understand the situation when the special commandos were formed last August. They were taking on an awful lot of people in a great hurry. Many of them were people who served in Saddam’s forces . . . The choice of taking them on was a difficult one. There was no supervision. There still really isn ’t any, and that applies to all the security forces. They’re all doing this.”

“This”, said Saad Sultan, the Human Rights Ministry official in charge of monitoring Iraq’s prisons, includes random arrests, sometimes without a warrant, hanging people from ceilings and beating them, attaching electrodes to ears, hands, feet and genitals, and holding hot irons to flesh.

Four of his 22 monitors have already quit their jobs, leaving a handful of lawyers to inspect scores of prisons.

“Two months ago I could go into a prison and more than 50 per cent of the people had been ill-treated,” Mr Sultan said. Six months ago the situation had been even worse.

Reports of torture and abuse are commonplace. Omar, a 22-year-old student, said that he was picked up in a night raid on his home in Baghdad by police commandos, who dragged him away from his family to a detention facility. No one told him where he was or what he was accused of, he said. As he was marched into prison, policemen lined up to beat him and his fellow detainees. The prisoners’ handcuffs were tightened until the men screamed.

The next day, he and his neighbour were blindfolded and transported to another facility, where his neighbour collapsed unconscious during a beating. He was then led into an interrogation room, where a policeman attached electrodes to his thumbs and toes. “I immediately asked what they wanted and he said something like, ‘You have been targeting police and national guardsmen’. Without waiting for my response, he switched on the electricity, then kept on turning it off and on until I could hardly breathe.

“I screamed under torture,” Omar said. “It’s not a place to prove your courage. These guys are trying to kill you for nothing.” He was released without charge after 12 days.

The abuse has not gone unnoticed by the coalition, but little has been done to address it. A US State Department report in February stated that Iraqi authorities had been accused of “arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, impunity, poor prison conditions — particularly in pre-trial detention facilities — and arbitrary arrest and detention.” A Human Rights Watch report also noted that “unlawful arrest, long-term incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment of detainees (including children) by Iraqi authorities have become routine and commonplace”.

Evidence of extra-judicial killings by the security forces has also come to light. Mr Sultan is investigating the case of three members of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary wing of one of the main Shia parties in government, who were arrested by police, handcuffed and beaten to death.

An Iraqi official said that the Iraqi National Guard, the US-trained paramilitary police, regularly disposed of the corpses of its victims by throwing them in the river. “The problem is that some people have still got that training from the past,” he said. “You have ten or twelve of them in the same unit working, and if they seize terrorists they will torture or kill them.”

He added that while the de facto death squads were not part of government policy, little was being done to counteract them. “These are exceptional times. It’s an emergency.”

General Adnan Thabet, the commandos’ commander and a special adviser to the Interior Minister, was a senior officer under Saddam. He was sentenced to death for plotting against the former dictator and was tortured after his sentence was commuted.

He denied any allegation of torture, but admitted: “This is a dirty war. We are the only ones with the nerves to fight it.”


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...683578,00.html

__________________
" For it is not enough to have a good mind, rather the main thing is to apply it well"- Descartes

Billo_Really

The following is one mans opinion against the war in Iraq. I like this one for the simple fact that you can't trash the source this time...

Why We Cannot Win

by Al Lorentz

09/20/04 "LewRockwell.com" -- Before I begin, let me state that I am a soldier currently deployed in Iraq, I am not an armchair quarterback. Nor am I some politically idealistic and naïve young soldier, I am an old and seasoned Non-Commissioned Officer with nearly 20 years under my belt. Additionally, I am not just a soldier with a muds-eye view of the war, I am in Civil Affairs and as such, it is my job to be aware of all the events occurring in this country and specifically in my region.

I have come to the conclusion that we cannot win here for a number of reasons. Ideology and idealism will never trump history and reality.

When we were preparing to deploy, I told my young soldiers to beware of the "political solution." Just when you think you have the situation on the ground in hand, someone will come along with a political directive that throws you off the tracks.

I believe that we could have won this un-Constitutional invasion of Iraq and possibly pulled off the even more un-Constitutional occupation and subjugation of this sovereign nation. It might have even been possible to foist democracy on these people who seem to have no desire, understanding or respect for such an institution. True the possibility of pulling all this off was a long shot and would have required several hundred billion dollars and even more casualties than we’ve seen to date but again it would have been possible, not realistic or necessary but possible.

http://www.informationclearinghouse....rticle6929.htm

Billo_Really

This post is for all those that trust the military for their information.

“WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE”

VETERANS FOR PEACE STATEMENT ON IRAQ PRISONER ABUSE SCANDAL

Veterans For Peace believes that the recent allegations of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison, and other places, by U.S. military personnel should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been to war.

In his investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found: “… numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force”.

Some of our members served in Military Intelligence or Military Police units. We were part of a culture that gives lip service to the Geneva Conventions in training but encourages psychological and physical brutality in the pursuit of “intell”. In other words, the problem has been and is systemic.

For many veterans the painful feeling that we have been here before is overwhelming. We recall that such brutalities were commonplace in Korea and Vietnam, wars fought, as is Iraq, in the midst of a civilian populace, where combatants blend into and disappear among the civilian population.

Operating in a foreign land, hostile to our presence, coupled with the administration’s demonstrated disdain for the restraints imposed by the Geneva Convention on prisoner treatment has led, inevitably, to these abuses. Can our soldiers, if captured, expect treatment governed by the terms of an agreement their own government has violated?

The abuse at military prisons is the latest step in the shameful course that our nation has been following in Iraq. It began with an invasion for reasons that have proven to be falsehoods and lies. This is more than the criminal activity of a few “bad apples”, it is the brutal, systemically embedded result of a misguided national policy.

There must be a full and public Congressional investigation and those all the way up the chain of command to General Myers and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld who should be held accountable.

The United States government must change course and admit to the unjust nature of this war, the disastrous miscalculations of the response of the Iraqi people to invasion and occupation, begin the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and restore real self-rule.

We expect there will be token dismissals. However we must not hang on to the policies that have led to these horrors, have further compromised our nation’s security and lost us the respect of the world. They must be excised, swiftly and thoroughly.

That is the only way to restore dignity and honor to our military and to our country.

Adopted by VFP National Board of Directors 5/14/04

cnredd

Iran still stoning women, says Nobel Laureate
By Mark Willacy, for 'AM'

A leading Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate says that the hardline Islamic regime is still using medieval punishments on its people, including the stoning of women for adultery and the torture of dissidents.

Shirin Ebadi has also attacked last week's presidential election, saying the result is not a true reflection of the will of the people.

Ms Ebadi strikes fear into the hearts of the hardline clerics who run Iran's Islamic regime.

A graduate of solitary confinement in one of the regime's jails, the Nobel Laureate refused to vote in last week's presidential election.

She is angry that the powerful, but unelected, Guardian Council disqualified hundreds of Iranians from standing in the poll.

"Whoever wants to become a candidate should have the right to become a candidate, including women," she said through a translator.

"Candidates should be from different ranges of thought. For instance in Iran if someone is a socialist he or she cannot be a candidate.

"Or if anyone is critical of the constitution, he or she is barred from standing.

"The most important issue is that people are not free to chose the election candidates. The candidates need to be approved first by the Guardian Council."

Ms Ebadi is one of just a few Iranians brave enough to speak out against the regime.

She has represented family members of murdered dissidents, women on death row for adultery, and writers accused of blaspheming the regime.

"At the moment some of the journalists and writers are in prison," she said.

"Two of my clients, because they expressed their opinions, they are in prison and they are now on a hunger strike. They are in bad physical condition and I am worried."

In Tehran's main bazaar there was a standard response when AM asked about human rights.

"Ask me another question," said one woman.

But one man was willing to answer the question.

"Human rights are important to me and it's an issue for our country because human rights are not practised in Iran," he says.

Ms Ebadi is particularly concerned about the treatment of women by the regime.

She cites the punishment meted out to women convicted of adultery.

"Unfortunately stoning exists in our law. According to the law, the punishment for adultery is to be stoned," she said.

"You bury the person up to their waist and then you throw small stones at them until they die. The stones should not be very big so that the person suffers before dying.

"I think this comes from the wrong interpretation of Islam."

Two Iranian women are facing imminent execution for adultery.

One is sentenced to flogging and then hanging while the other will be buried up to her waist and then stoned to death.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...6/s1395803.htm

teacher

Simple question folks. I can produce more stories of success in Iraq than you can failures. But the question is, would you believe them?

vandree

Can you find them? Because not even the President in his last speech could be very specific about the progress done in Iraq.....

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103 Iraqi Parliamentarians Demand Withdrawal of US Troops

By Juan Cole

07/07/05 - - Gilber Achcar kindly shares his translation of an al-Hayat article:

'[More than] 103 MPs Demand a Timetable for the Withdrawal of Foreign Troops

Baghdad – Abdel-Wahed Tohmeh – Al-Hayat, July 4, 2005

103 members of the National Assembly (the Parliament) have demanded the adoption of a resolution cancelling the request made by the Government to the UN Security Council to extend the presence of multinational forces, and urging the Government to put “a clear plan for army building and a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops” from Iraq.

Falah Hassan Shneishel MP (of the “Independent National Bloc”) [the INB is the parliamentary bloc of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Current, which plays a prominent role in the organization of the political fight against the occupation] explained that the number of MPs demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops has exceeded 103 after more than 20 additional MPs have adopted the statement issued two weeks ago in this regard.

[See my translation of a previous report by Tohmeh.]

Shneishel threatened to call for popular demonstrations in case “the authorities were not serious about the implementation of the demands of the Iraqis for an end to occupation.”

Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Visit his blog http://www.juancole.com



http://www.informationclearinghouse....rticle9414.htm

teacher

[quote][quote=vandree]Can you find them? Because not even the President in his last speech could be very specific about the progress done in Iraq.....[/QUOTE

Doesn't answer the question.

vandree

The answer is: depends on the source


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Iraqi women burned with acid for non-religious clothing
by Chris Shumway (bio)

Jul 6 - Police in Baghdad say an increasing number of women are being attacked for opting to wear Western clothing in public instead of traditional Islamic dress. The weapon of choice for attackers is corrosive acid, according to police and several survivors.

"A month ago I was walking from my college to my house when I was abducted in the street by three men," Hania Abdul-Jabbar, a 23-year-old university student, told IRIN News. "They dropped acid in my face and on my legs. They cut all my hair off while hitting me in the face many times telling me it's the price for not obeying God's wish in using the veil."

Major Abbas Dilemi, a police investigator in Baghdad, told IRIN that most of the acid attacks had occurred in the upscale Sunni district of Al-Mansour and the Shiite Al-Kadhimiya districts. He also said Islamic fundamentalists have recruited children to carry out some attacks.

Fundamentalists in other parts of the country have instituted their own brand of Sharia, or Islamic law, violently targeting women who do not comply with dress codes and other rules. In the western province of Al-Anbar, fundamentalists have reportedly killed five women for not following the orders of religious militants who have effectively held power in the region since the 2003 US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime.


http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2054

cnredd

He deferred to the Iraqi government...The actual quote...

"When the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

Don't look too hard at that and interpret it in some partisan way.

It's to the point and doesn't hide any meaning.

Accept the quote for what it is.