Der Irak-Feldzug
Bei den Figuren, welche nun von US-Geheimdiensten - man denkt an die "Gruppe Ulbricht"... - in den Irak gebracht werden, um ihre Quisling-Arbeit aufzunehmen, handelt es sich allenfalls im weitesten Sinne um "Dissidenten". Eher schon könnte man von z.T. überaus reichen Männern sprechen, die sich beim Plündern der Pfründe nicht mit den Saddam-Clans einigen konnten.
CIA report slams Pentagon's favorite Iraqi
By Eli J. Lake
UPI State Department Correspondent
>From the International Desk
Published 4/8/2003 1:55 PM
WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- The Central Intelligence Agency
issued a report last week claiming that the opposition leader
airlifted by the Pentagon to Iraq over the weekend, Ahmad
Chalabi, would not be an effective leader to replace Saddam
Hussein because many Iraqis do not like him.
In a classified report distributed widely within the U.S.
government, the CIA argues that Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon
civilian officials, and Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, the leader of
the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, have little popular support among Iraqis on the ground.
Critics of the agency have questioned the report's timing and
motives.
"The CIA has been bad mouthing Chalabi and the INC for years.
What is surprising is that they are still devoting resources to their
character assassination effort instead of other more obvious
missions," said Randy Scheunemann, a long time adviser to
Chalabi and now President of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, a
lobbying group formed last year to support ending Saddam
Hussein's regime. "Whatever the stories the agency may be
spreading it's clear Centcom Commander Tommy Franks thinks
the INC has an important role to play."
The report comes at a critical time for U.S. policy as coalition
forces enter Baghdad. While publicly senior American officials
have said they plan to include both Iraqi opposition leaders and
leaders culled from inside the country in the next government in
Baghdad, behind the scenes hawks and doves in the
administration are fighting a nasty battle over the leadership of
the transition authority that replaces Saddam's regime. Chalabi
has long been supported by a leading hawk, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other advocates of regime change
in Iraq.
Last week Congressional appropriators voted to funnel $2.5
billion to the State Department for reconstructing the country
even though the White House originally requested the money go
to the Pentagon. Senior State Department officials deny lobbying
for the money. Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to two
State Department officials, called the White House from his
plane returning from Brussels last week to complain about a
policy memo from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
calling on the White House to name the transition authority for
Iraq sooner than expected.
A U.S. official familiar with the CIA report told United Press
International Monday, "This is about the Iraqi interim authority. It
discusses the factors likely to affect the legitimacy and
acceptability of an Iraqi transitional authority in the eyes of the
Iraqi public. In part it looks at Iraqi attitudes toward the Iraqi
opposition and how the INC is viewed on the inside."
A former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the report said,
"They basically say that every time you mention Chalabi's name
to an Iraqi, they want to puke." This official however questioned
how accurate the CIA's assessment of Iraqi politics could be
given the fluidity of events on the ground there.
"I think that nobody has any idea who is popular on the ground
inside Iraq," said Danielle Pletka, the American Enterprise
Institute's Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
told UPI. "People who say that they do, including agencies of the
U.S. government, are saying so to further a political agenda."
When asked about the CIA report on CBS' "60 Minutes" Sunday
evening, Chalabi said it seemed to him the agency "is more
focused on me than on Saddam."
The CIA has long considered Chalabi an unsuitable leader for
the government that replaces Saddam. In 1992, while the agency
supported Chalabi and an open strategy to spark a rebellion
against Baghdad from the north, they also pursued a palace
coup strategy without telling him. The agency has also held
Chalabi accountable for compromising a coup attempt in 1995,
when Saddam's men rounded up disloyal military officers the
agency had hoped would kill the Iraqi leader.
Last year, the agency released an assessment of intelligence
Chalabi's organization provided to the U.S. government,
concluding that approximately 30 percent of it was accurate.
However, one key piece of intelligence from Chalabi's operation
was firmed up over the weekend when Marines raided a terrorist
training facility outside of Baghdad in Salman Pak. Defectors
slipped out of the country over a year ago by Chalabi's Iraqi
National Congress said the facility trained numerous al-Qaida
fighters. A spokesman for U.S. Central Command said over the
weekend the U.S. military had concluded the facility was being
used for terrorist training.
The agency has also blamed Chalabi for predicting Iraqis would
welcome American troops in the initial phases of the war, though
recent reporting from al-Najaf and Basra suggests that the
opposition leader's optimism may not have been as misplaced
as at first thought.
CIA report slams Pentagon's favorite Iraqi
By Eli J. Lake
UPI State Department Correspondent
>From the International Desk
Published 4/8/2003 1:55 PM
WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- The Central Intelligence Agency
issued a report last week claiming that the opposition leader
airlifted by the Pentagon to Iraq over the weekend, Ahmad
Chalabi, would not be an effective leader to replace Saddam
Hussein because many Iraqis do not like him.
In a classified report distributed widely within the U.S.
government, the CIA argues that Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon
civilian officials, and Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, the leader of
the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, have little popular support among Iraqis on the ground.
Critics of the agency have questioned the report's timing and
motives.
"The CIA has been bad mouthing Chalabi and the INC for years.
What is surprising is that they are still devoting resources to their
character assassination effort instead of other more obvious
missions," said Randy Scheunemann, a long time adviser to
Chalabi and now President of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, a
lobbying group formed last year to support ending Saddam
Hussein's regime. "Whatever the stories the agency may be
spreading it's clear Centcom Commander Tommy Franks thinks
the INC has an important role to play."
The report comes at a critical time for U.S. policy as coalition
forces enter Baghdad. While publicly senior American officials
have said they plan to include both Iraqi opposition leaders and
leaders culled from inside the country in the next government in
Baghdad, behind the scenes hawks and doves in the
administration are fighting a nasty battle over the leadership of
the transition authority that replaces Saddam's regime. Chalabi
has long been supported by a leading hawk, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other advocates of regime change
in Iraq.
Last week Congressional appropriators voted to funnel $2.5
billion to the State Department for reconstructing the country
even though the White House originally requested the money go
to the Pentagon. Senior State Department officials deny lobbying
for the money. Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to two
State Department officials, called the White House from his
plane returning from Brussels last week to complain about a
policy memo from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
calling on the White House to name the transition authority for
Iraq sooner than expected.
A U.S. official familiar with the CIA report told United Press
International Monday, "This is about the Iraqi interim authority. It
discusses the factors likely to affect the legitimacy and
acceptability of an Iraqi transitional authority in the eyes of the
Iraqi public. In part it looks at Iraqi attitudes toward the Iraqi
opposition and how the INC is viewed on the inside."
A former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the report said,
"They basically say that every time you mention Chalabi's name
to an Iraqi, they want to puke." This official however questioned
how accurate the CIA's assessment of Iraqi politics could be
given the fluidity of events on the ground there.
"I think that nobody has any idea who is popular on the ground
inside Iraq," said Danielle Pletka, the American Enterprise
Institute's Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
told UPI. "People who say that they do, including agencies of the
U.S. government, are saying so to further a political agenda."
When asked about the CIA report on CBS' "60 Minutes" Sunday
evening, Chalabi said it seemed to him the agency "is more
focused on me than on Saddam."
The CIA has long considered Chalabi an unsuitable leader for
the government that replaces Saddam. In 1992, while the agency
supported Chalabi and an open strategy to spark a rebellion
against Baghdad from the north, they also pursued a palace
coup strategy without telling him. The agency has also held
Chalabi accountable for compromising a coup attempt in 1995,
when Saddam's men rounded up disloyal military officers the
agency had hoped would kill the Iraqi leader.
Last year, the agency released an assessment of intelligence
Chalabi's organization provided to the U.S. government,
concluding that approximately 30 percent of it was accurate.
However, one key piece of intelligence from Chalabi's operation
was firmed up over the weekend when Marines raided a terrorist
training facility outside of Baghdad in Salman Pak. Defectors
slipped out of the country over a year ago by Chalabi's Iraqi
National Congress said the facility trained numerous al-Qaida
fighters. A spokesman for U.S. Central Command said over the
weekend the U.S. military had concluded the facility was being
used for terrorist training.
The agency has also blamed Chalabi for predicting Iraqis would
welcome American troops in the initial phases of the war, though
recent reporting from al-Najaf and Basra suggests that the
opposition leader's optimism may not have been as misplaced
as at first thought.
"Es gibt eine Form von Toleranz beim Menschen, die nichts anderes ist als ein Mangel an Würde." Joseph Schumpeter
Eine überaus erstaunliche Stimme aus dem angloamerikanischen Lager:
ZNet | Iraq
Crime Against Humanity
by John Pilger; April 10, 2003
They have blown off the limbs of women and the scalps of
children. Their victims overwhelm the morgues and flood into
hospitals that lack even aspirin.
John Pilger on a piratical war that brought terrorism and death to
Iraq
A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by
an American fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly
fire", spoke to his mother on a satellite phone. Holding the
phone over his head so that she could hear the sound of the
American planes overhead, he said: "Listen, that's the sound of
freedom."
Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was
being ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever
designed the Observer's page three last Sunday had Joseph
Heller in mind when he wrote the weasel headline: "The
moment young Omar discovered the price of war". These
cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American
marine reaching out to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just
participated in the mass murder of his father, mother, two sisters
and brother during the unprovoked invasion of their homeland, in
breach of the most basic law of civilised peoples.
No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal newspaper;
no honest headline, such as: "This American marine murdered
this boy's family". No photograph of Omar's father, mother,
sisters and brother dismembered and blood-soaked by
automatic fire. Versions of the Observer's propaganda picture
have been appearing in the Anglo-American press since the
invasion began: tender cameos of American troops reaching out,
kneeling, ministering to their "liberated" victims.
And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where 80
men, women and children were rocketed to death? Apart from
the Mirror, where were the pictures, and footage, of small
children holding up their hands in terror while Bush's thugs
forced their families to kneel in the street? Imagine that in a
British high street. It is a glimpse of fascism, and we have a right
to see it.
"To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the
Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, "is not only an
international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing
only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole." In stating this guiding principle of
international law, the judges specifically rejected German
arguments of the "necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against
other countries.
Nothing Bush and Blair, their cluster-bombing boys and their
media court do now will change the truth of their great crime in
Iraq. It is a matter of record, understood by the majority of
humanity, if not by those who claim to speak for "us". As Denis
Halliday said of the Anglo-American embargo against Iraq, it will
"slaughter them in the history books". It was Halliday who, as
assistant secretary general of the United Nations, set up the "oil
for food" programme in Iraq in 1996 and quickly realised that the
UN had become an instrument of "a genocidal attack on a whole
society". He resigned in protest, as did his successor, Hans von
Sponeck, who described "the wanton and shaming punishment
of a nation".
I have mentioned these two men often in these pages, partly
because their names and their witness have been airbrushed
from most of the media. I well remember Jeremy Paxman
bellowing at Halliday on Newsnight shortly after his resignation:
"So are you an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" That helped set
the tone for the travesty of journalism that now daily, almost
gleefully, treats criminal war as sport. In a leaked e-mail Roger
Mosey, the head of BBC Television News, described the BBC's
war coverage as "extraordinary - it almost feels like World Cup
football when you go from Um Qasr to another theatre of war
somewhere else and you're switching between battles".
He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do, and
no one will say so, even when they are murdering journalists.
They bring to this one-sided attack on a weak and mostly
defenceless people the same racist, homicidal intent I
witnessed in Vietnam, where they had a whole programme of
murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs through all their
foreign wars, as it does through their own divided society. Take
your pick of the current onslaught. Last weekend, a column of
their tanks swept heroically into Baghdad and out again. They
murdered people along the way.
They blew off the limbs of women and the scalps of children.
Hear their voices on the unedited and unbroadcast videotape:
"We shot the shit out of it." Their victims overwhelm the morgues
and hospitals - hospitals already denuded of drugs and
painkillers by America's deliberate withholding of $5.4bn in
humanitarian goods, approved by the Security Council and paid
for by Iraq. The screams of children undergoing amputation with
minimal anaesthetic qualify as the BBC man's "sound of
freedom".
Heller would appreciate the sideshows. Take the British
helicopter pilot who came to blows with an American who had
almost shot him down. "Don't you know the Iraqis don't have a
fucking air force?" he shouted. Did this pilot reflect on the truth he
had uttered, on the whole craven enterprise against a stricken
third world country and his own part in this crime? I doubt it. The
British have been the most skilled at delusion and lying. By any
standard, the Iraqi resistance to the high-tech Anglo-American
machine was heroic. With ancient tanks and mortars, small
arms and desperate ambushes, they panicked the Americans
and reduced the British military class to one of its specialities -
mendacious condescension.
The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums", "pockets of
Ba'ath Party loyalists", "kamikaze" and "feds" (fedayeen). They
are not real people: cultured and cultivated people. They are
Arabs. This vocabulary of dishonour has been faithfully parroted
by those enjoying it all from the broadcasting box. "What do you
make of Basra?" asked the Today programme's presenter of a
former general embedded in the studio. "It's hugely encouraging,
isn't it?" he replied. Their mutual excitement, like their plummy
voices, are their bond.
On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a former
BBC Middle East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this
"hugely encouraging" truth - fleeting pictures on Sky News of
British soldiers smashing their way into a family home in Basra,
pointing their guns at a woman and manhandling, hooding and
manacling young men, one of whom was shown quivering with
terror. "Is Britain 'liberating' Basra by taking political prisoners
and, if so, based on what sort of intelligence, given Britain's long
unfamiliarity with this territory and its inhabitants . . . The least
this ugly display will do is remind Arabs and Muslims
everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double standards - we can show
your prisoners in . . . degrading positions, but don't you dare
show ours.".
Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World Cup
football". There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr; desperate
refugees are streaming in and the hospitals are overflowing. All
this misery is due entirely to the "coalition" invasion and the
British siege, which forced the United Nations to withdraw its
humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic relief agency, which
has sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard humanitarian
quota for water in emergency situations is 20 litres per person
per day.
Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and people
drinking from contaminated wells. According to the World Health
Organisation, 1.5 million people across southern Iraq are
without water, and epidemics are inevitable. And what are "our
boys" doing to alleviate this, apart from staging childish,
theatrical occupations of presidential palaces, having fired
shoulder-held missiles into a civilian city and dropped cluster
bombs?
A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock that "it is
difficult to deliver aid in an area that is still an active battle zone".
The logic of his own words mocks him. If Iraq was not a battle
zone, if the British and the Americans were not defying
international law, there would be no difficulty in delivering aid.
There is something especially disgusting about the lurid
propaganda coming from these PR-trained British officers, who
have not a clue about Iraq and its people. They describe the
liberation they are bringing from "the world's worst tyranny", as if
anything, including death by cluster bomb or dysentery, is better
than "life under Saddam". The inconvenient truth is that,
according to Unicef, the Ba'athists built the most modern health
service in the Middle East.
No one disputes the grim, totalitarian nature of the regime; but
Saddam Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create a
modern secular society and a large and prosperous middle
class. Iraq was the only Arab country with a 90 per cent clean
water supply and with free education. All this was smashed by
the Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed
in 1990, the Iraqi civil service organised a food distribution
system that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation
described as "a model of efficiency . . . undoubtedly saving Iraq
from famine". That, too, was smashed when the invasion was
launched.
Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have to put on
protective suits to recover dead and wounded in vehicles hit by
American "friendly fire"? The reason is that the Americans are
using solid uranium coated on missiles and tank shells. When I
was in southern Iraq, doctors estimated a sevenfold increase in
cancers in areas where depleted uranium was used by the
Americans and British in the 1991 war. Under the subsequent
embargo, Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied equipment with
which to clean up its contaminated battlefields. The hospitals in
Basra have wards overflowing with children with cancers of a
variety not seen before 1991. They have no painkillers; they are
fortunate if they have aspirin.
With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera), little of this
has been reported. Instead, the media have performed their
preordained role as imperial America's "soft power": rarely
identifying "our" crime, or misrepresenting it as a struggle
between good intentions and evil incarnate. This abject
professional and moral failure now beckons the unseen
dangers of such an epic, false victory, inviting its repetition in
Iran, Korea, Syria, Cuba, China.
George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I was just
following orders.'" He is correct. The Nuremberg judges left in no
doubt the right of ordinary soldiers to follow their conscience in
an illegal war of aggression. Two British soldiers have had the
courage to seek status as conscientious objectors. They face
court martial and imprisonment; yet virtually no questions have
been asked about them in the media. George Galloway has
been pilloried for asking the same question as Bush, and he
and Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, are being
threatened with withdrawal of the Labour whip.
Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the
Prime Minister is a war criminal who should be sent to The
Hague. This is not gratuitous; on the prima facie evidence, Blair
is a war criminal, and all those who have been, in one form or
another, accessories should be reported to the International
Criminal Court. Not only did they promote a charade of pretexts
few now take seriously, they brought terrorism and death to Iraq.
A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees that the
new court has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University wrote,
to investigate "not only the regime, but also the UN bombing and
sanctions which violated the human rights of Iraqis on a vast
scale". Add the present piratical war, whose spectre is the
uniting of Arab nationalism with militant Islam. The whirlwind
sown by Blair and Bush is just beginning. Such is the magnitude
of their crime.
ZNet | Iraq
Crime Against Humanity
by John Pilger; April 10, 2003
They have blown off the limbs of women and the scalps of
children. Their victims overwhelm the morgues and flood into
hospitals that lack even aspirin.
John Pilger on a piratical war that brought terrorism and death to
Iraq
A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by
an American fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly
fire", spoke to his mother on a satellite phone. Holding the
phone over his head so that she could hear the sound of the
American planes overhead, he said: "Listen, that's the sound of
freedom."
Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was
being ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever
designed the Observer's page three last Sunday had Joseph
Heller in mind when he wrote the weasel headline: "The
moment young Omar discovered the price of war". These
cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American
marine reaching out to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just
participated in the mass murder of his father, mother, two sisters
and brother during the unprovoked invasion of their homeland, in
breach of the most basic law of civilised peoples.
No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal newspaper;
no honest headline, such as: "This American marine murdered
this boy's family". No photograph of Omar's father, mother,
sisters and brother dismembered and blood-soaked by
automatic fire. Versions of the Observer's propaganda picture
have been appearing in the Anglo-American press since the
invasion began: tender cameos of American troops reaching out,
kneeling, ministering to their "liberated" victims.
And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where 80
men, women and children were rocketed to death? Apart from
the Mirror, where were the pictures, and footage, of small
children holding up their hands in terror while Bush's thugs
forced their families to kneel in the street? Imagine that in a
British high street. It is a glimpse of fascism, and we have a right
to see it.
"To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the
Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, "is not only an
international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing
only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole." In stating this guiding principle of
international law, the judges specifically rejected German
arguments of the "necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against
other countries.
Nothing Bush and Blair, their cluster-bombing boys and their
media court do now will change the truth of their great crime in
Iraq. It is a matter of record, understood by the majority of
humanity, if not by those who claim to speak for "us". As Denis
Halliday said of the Anglo-American embargo against Iraq, it will
"slaughter them in the history books". It was Halliday who, as
assistant secretary general of the United Nations, set up the "oil
for food" programme in Iraq in 1996 and quickly realised that the
UN had become an instrument of "a genocidal attack on a whole
society". He resigned in protest, as did his successor, Hans von
Sponeck, who described "the wanton and shaming punishment
of a nation".
I have mentioned these two men often in these pages, partly
because their names and their witness have been airbrushed
from most of the media. I well remember Jeremy Paxman
bellowing at Halliday on Newsnight shortly after his resignation:
"So are you an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" That helped set
the tone for the travesty of journalism that now daily, almost
gleefully, treats criminal war as sport. In a leaked e-mail Roger
Mosey, the head of BBC Television News, described the BBC's
war coverage as "extraordinary - it almost feels like World Cup
football when you go from Um Qasr to another theatre of war
somewhere else and you're switching between battles".
He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do, and
no one will say so, even when they are murdering journalists.
They bring to this one-sided attack on a weak and mostly
defenceless people the same racist, homicidal intent I
witnessed in Vietnam, where they had a whole programme of
murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs through all their
foreign wars, as it does through their own divided society. Take
your pick of the current onslaught. Last weekend, a column of
their tanks swept heroically into Baghdad and out again. They
murdered people along the way.
They blew off the limbs of women and the scalps of children.
Hear their voices on the unedited and unbroadcast videotape:
"We shot the shit out of it." Their victims overwhelm the morgues
and hospitals - hospitals already denuded of drugs and
painkillers by America's deliberate withholding of $5.4bn in
humanitarian goods, approved by the Security Council and paid
for by Iraq. The screams of children undergoing amputation with
minimal anaesthetic qualify as the BBC man's "sound of
freedom".
Heller would appreciate the sideshows. Take the British
helicopter pilot who came to blows with an American who had
almost shot him down. "Don't you know the Iraqis don't have a
fucking air force?" he shouted. Did this pilot reflect on the truth he
had uttered, on the whole craven enterprise against a stricken
third world country and his own part in this crime? I doubt it. The
British have been the most skilled at delusion and lying. By any
standard, the Iraqi resistance to the high-tech Anglo-American
machine was heroic. With ancient tanks and mortars, small
arms and desperate ambushes, they panicked the Americans
and reduced the British military class to one of its specialities -
mendacious condescension.
The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums", "pockets of
Ba'ath Party loyalists", "kamikaze" and "feds" (fedayeen). They
are not real people: cultured and cultivated people. They are
Arabs. This vocabulary of dishonour has been faithfully parroted
by those enjoying it all from the broadcasting box. "What do you
make of Basra?" asked the Today programme's presenter of a
former general embedded in the studio. "It's hugely encouraging,
isn't it?" he replied. Their mutual excitement, like their plummy
voices, are their bond.
On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a former
BBC Middle East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this
"hugely encouraging" truth - fleeting pictures on Sky News of
British soldiers smashing their way into a family home in Basra,
pointing their guns at a woman and manhandling, hooding and
manacling young men, one of whom was shown quivering with
terror. "Is Britain 'liberating' Basra by taking political prisoners
and, if so, based on what sort of intelligence, given Britain's long
unfamiliarity with this territory and its inhabitants . . . The least
this ugly display will do is remind Arabs and Muslims
everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double standards - we can show
your prisoners in . . . degrading positions, but don't you dare
show ours.".
Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World Cup
football". There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr; desperate
refugees are streaming in and the hospitals are overflowing. All
this misery is due entirely to the "coalition" invasion and the
British siege, which forced the United Nations to withdraw its
humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic relief agency, which
has sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard humanitarian
quota for water in emergency situations is 20 litres per person
per day.
Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and people
drinking from contaminated wells. According to the World Health
Organisation, 1.5 million people across southern Iraq are
without water, and epidemics are inevitable. And what are "our
boys" doing to alleviate this, apart from staging childish,
theatrical occupations of presidential palaces, having fired
shoulder-held missiles into a civilian city and dropped cluster
bombs?
A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock that "it is
difficult to deliver aid in an area that is still an active battle zone".
The logic of his own words mocks him. If Iraq was not a battle
zone, if the British and the Americans were not defying
international law, there would be no difficulty in delivering aid.
There is something especially disgusting about the lurid
propaganda coming from these PR-trained British officers, who
have not a clue about Iraq and its people. They describe the
liberation they are bringing from "the world's worst tyranny", as if
anything, including death by cluster bomb or dysentery, is better
than "life under Saddam". The inconvenient truth is that,
according to Unicef, the Ba'athists built the most modern health
service in the Middle East.
No one disputes the grim, totalitarian nature of the regime; but
Saddam Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create a
modern secular society and a large and prosperous middle
class. Iraq was the only Arab country with a 90 per cent clean
water supply and with free education. All this was smashed by
the Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed
in 1990, the Iraqi civil service organised a food distribution
system that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation
described as "a model of efficiency . . . undoubtedly saving Iraq
from famine". That, too, was smashed when the invasion was
launched.
Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have to put on
protective suits to recover dead and wounded in vehicles hit by
American "friendly fire"? The reason is that the Americans are
using solid uranium coated on missiles and tank shells. When I
was in southern Iraq, doctors estimated a sevenfold increase in
cancers in areas where depleted uranium was used by the
Americans and British in the 1991 war. Under the subsequent
embargo, Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied equipment with
which to clean up its contaminated battlefields. The hospitals in
Basra have wards overflowing with children with cancers of a
variety not seen before 1991. They have no painkillers; they are
fortunate if they have aspirin.
With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera), little of this
has been reported. Instead, the media have performed their
preordained role as imperial America's "soft power": rarely
identifying "our" crime, or misrepresenting it as a struggle
between good intentions and evil incarnate. This abject
professional and moral failure now beckons the unseen
dangers of such an epic, false victory, inviting its repetition in
Iran, Korea, Syria, Cuba, China.
George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I was just
following orders.'" He is correct. The Nuremberg judges left in no
doubt the right of ordinary soldiers to follow their conscience in
an illegal war of aggression. Two British soldiers have had the
courage to seek status as conscientious objectors. They face
court martial and imprisonment; yet virtually no questions have
been asked about them in the media. George Galloway has
been pilloried for asking the same question as Bush, and he
and Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, are being
threatened with withdrawal of the Labour whip.
Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the
Prime Minister is a war criminal who should be sent to The
Hague. This is not gratuitous; on the prima facie evidence, Blair
is a war criminal, and all those who have been, in one form or
another, accessories should be reported to the International
Criminal Court. Not only did they promote a charade of pretexts
few now take seriously, they brought terrorism and death to Iraq.
A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees that the
new court has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University wrote,
to investigate "not only the regime, but also the UN bombing and
sanctions which violated the human rights of Iraqis on a vast
scale". Add the present piratical war, whose spectre is the
uniting of Arab nationalism with militant Islam. The whirlwind
sown by Blair and Bush is just beginning. Such is the magnitude
of their crime.
"Es gibt eine Form von Toleranz beim Menschen, die nichts anderes ist als ein Mangel an Würde." Joseph Schumpeter
Der Krieg ist noch nicht aus, da hat der Nachkrieg schon begonnen.
iraqwar.ru
Iraqi Shi'ite Leader Al-Khoei Assassinated in Najaf
10.04.2003 [19:19]
Senior Iraqi Sh'ite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei was
assassinated at the mosque in the holy city of Najaf on
Thursday, a member of his family foundation told Reuters.
Ali Jabr, a member of the London-based Khoei foundation,
confirmed to Reuters by phone that Abdel Majid was dead. The
murder is sure to raise tensions among Iraq's majority Shi'ite
population.
Majid is the son of the late Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei, spiritual
leader of Iraq's Shi'ites at the time of the 1991 Gulf War
Al-Khoei's nephew, Jawad al-Khoei, told Reuters from the
Iranian holy city of Qom that Abdul Majid was stabbed to death at
the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, one of the holiest shrines for
Shi'ite Muslims.
"An hour ago we talked to the persons who were with him at the
time of the incident. They said he was martyred by treacherous
hands," Jawad al-Khoei said.
iraqwar.ru
Iraqi Shi'ite Leader Al-Khoei Assassinated in Najaf
10.04.2003 [19:19]
Senior Iraqi Sh'ite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei was
assassinated at the mosque in the holy city of Najaf on
Thursday, a member of his family foundation told Reuters.
Ali Jabr, a member of the London-based Khoei foundation,
confirmed to Reuters by phone that Abdel Majid was dead. The
murder is sure to raise tensions among Iraq's majority Shi'ite
population.
Majid is the son of the late Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei, spiritual
leader of Iraq's Shi'ites at the time of the 1991 Gulf War
Al-Khoei's nephew, Jawad al-Khoei, told Reuters from the
Iranian holy city of Qom that Abdul Majid was stabbed to death at
the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, one of the holiest shrines for
Shi'ite Muslims.
"An hour ago we talked to the persons who were with him at the
time of the incident. They said he was martyred by treacherous
hands," Jawad al-Khoei said.
"Es gibt eine Form von Toleranz beim Menschen, die nichts anderes ist als ein Mangel an Würde." Joseph Schumpeter
Nun ja, im Nordirak spielt sich derzeit ab, was auch im Raume Bagdad in ähnlicher Weise vorsichgehen wird. Nachdem die Führung implodiert ist, kämpft man nur noch für sich. Die Kurden verhandeln nun nicht mit den Republikanischen Garden, sondern mit den Clanführern der Iraker, wie man sich "entflechtet". Kurz der Krieg rutscht von der Ebene der Armee-Einheiten auf eine eher tribale Ebene herunter. - Aber unabhängig von der militärischen Entwicklung der nächsten Tage - Afghanistan docet! - wird der Nachkrieg im Irak sehr, sehr lange andauern...
Beste Grüße
Wever
Beste Grüße
Wever
"Es gibt eine Form von Toleranz beim Menschen, die nichts anderes ist als ein Mangel an Würde." Joseph Schumpeter
Quelle: www.iraqwar.ru
Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President
10.04.2003 [17:51]
A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.
The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'
The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.
This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.
The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.
The PNAC report also:
l refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';
l describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';
l reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;
l says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';
l spotlights China for 'regime change' saying 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia'. This, it says, may lead to 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratisation in China';
l calls for the creation of 'US Space Forces', to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent 'enemies' using the internet against the US;
l hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons -- which the nation has banned -- in decades to come. It says: 'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';
l and pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.
Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.
'This is a blueprint for US world domination -- a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.'
Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President
10.04.2003 [17:51]
A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.
The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'
The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.
This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.
The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.
The PNAC report also:
l refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';
l describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';
l reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;
l says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';
l spotlights China for 'regime change' saying 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia'. This, it says, may lead to 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratisation in China';
l calls for the creation of 'US Space Forces', to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent 'enemies' using the internet against the US;
l hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons -- which the nation has banned -- in decades to come. It says: 'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';
l and pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.
Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.
'This is a blueprint for US world domination -- a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.'
"Es gibt eine Form von Toleranz beim Menschen, die nichts anderes ist als ein Mangel an Würde." Joseph Schumpeter
Tach,
Ahmad Chalabi heist also die potentiell zukünftige Marionette.
Gibt es eigentlich, wenn man einmal die Interessen der coalition außen vor läßt, eine ernst zu nehmende irakische Persönlichkeit, die von unabhängigen wie von offiziellen Ebenen aus eine Alternative darstellen würde?
So ein Schlamassel !!!!!
Ahmad Chalabi heist also die potentiell zukünftige Marionette.
Gibt es eigentlich, wenn man einmal die Interessen der coalition außen vor läßt, eine ernst zu nehmende irakische Persönlichkeit, die von unabhängigen wie von offiziellen Ebenen aus eine Alternative darstellen würde?
So ein Schlamassel !!!!!
Haltet die Ohren steif, 
..... Adorno
..... Adorno
haben die eine Flak Stellung übersehen?
Hm, ich vermute, das dies vorderhand nicht der Fall ist. Diesem Kulturkreis ist der STAAT, wie er sich in Europa besonders seit dem 16. Jahrhundert herausgebildet hat, fremd, bzw., daß, was die Kolonialherren diesbezüglich dort "implenentierten" ist allenfalls Firnis. Zwar einigen sich die Sippen und Clans etc. auf eine sehr moderate und staunenswerte Weise in die Verteilung der Machtmasse, aber eine ernsthaft geduldete politische Opposition ist eigentlich ein Ding der Unmöglichkeit. Folglich fallen diese Länder - tritt der Autokrat ab - in den Bürgerkrieg zurück. Die Amerikaner sammeln auch keineswegs - auch nicht in Afghanistan! - "demokratische" Dissidenten. Sie halten es eher wie die Bolschewisten im GULag-System: die "Politischen" werden den "Kriminellen" zum Fraß vorgeworfen. Aus US-Perspektive durchaus clever: die Sprache des Geldes verstehen beide bestens: die Amerikaner und ihre jeweiligen landeseigenen Vasallen...T.W.A. hat geschrieben:Tach,
Gibt es eigentlich, wenn man einmal die Interessen der coalition außen vor läßt, eine ernst zu nehmende irakische Persönlichkeit, die von unabhängigen wie von offiziellen Ebenen aus eine Alternative darstellen würde?
"Es gibt eine Form von Toleranz beim Menschen, die nichts anderes ist als ein Mangel an Würde." Joseph Schumpeter