What Chomsky writes about the 'offers' made to Iran is not only misleading, it is total crap. What about the nukes in Israel? They never even signed the NPT. And, Iran has been controlled from the beginning by this UN nuclear power 'sales office' called IAEA - Url.: http://www.countercurrents.org/u...- henk160805.htm
The Chomsky article concerns the so called 'Iranian Danger' - the wholly by the US group whipped up fake 'nuclear crisis' which Chomsky of course calls an 'Iranian crisis' - ''A negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis is within reach. The US must take three basic steps to defuse this confrontation. The consequences of not doing so could be grim.'' - By Noam Chomsky - 06/19/06 - "The Guardian" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/hdxzh
What he writes about the 'offers' made to Iran is total crap. What about the nukes in Israel? They never even signed the NPT. And Iran has been controlled from the beginning by this UN nuclear power sales office called IAEA - Url.: http://www.countercurrents.org/u...- henk160805.htm
http://www.zmag.org/parecon/conspiracy.htm
http://last-straw.net/
This is all about petroeuro/petrodollar. Nukes are just a front or excuse to create tension.
HEU/LEU - Why USA wants to supply fuel.
http://www.usec.com/v2001_02/ HTM..._howitworks.asp
Press Conference: Mr. Hans Blix, Chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, will brief on the final report of the Commission
http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/pre...e/ pc060601pm.rm
Iran cut out of UN talks, This is what they would have discussed, Bolton stunt.
Permanent Representative of Iran, H.E. Mr. M. Javad Zarif. UN Webcast
Weblink: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/pre...e/ pc060329pm.rm
Iran has done everything possible to negotiate with the Bush clan. Iran's only option is to cave in. Iran will not fall to USA threats, nor will the ME international community. Bush clan is the only party to threats and fears. I personally think this debate will go on for another 6 months. Hence the Pentagon recoil and switch gears approach to NK crisis. However, this does depend on the how sucessful the Iran Bourse is. June 30, 2006 is last I heard.
http://agonist.org/20060607/ iran...y_ready_to_open
http://www.infowars.com/ articles...or_business.htm
The irony is the UN will be on recess 19-30 June 2006 to cover Progress Report on UN Reform.
http://www.unpo.org/news_detail....arg=02&par=4679
Catch my drift, Iran will be dragged on. NK is new threat
Don | 06.19.06 - 2:32 pm
http://sbcglobal.net/
http://www.ifthewebsite.com/
EXCERPT: "ONE CAN ONLY HOPE THAT ONE DAY WE ALL FULLY UNDERSTAND THE PERNICIOUS EFFECTS OF THE “LIBERAL MEDIA” ON OUR MINDS, OUR WILL, OUR LIVES AND OUR WORLD. CONSIDERING THE STATE OF THE WORLD TODAY, WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME LEFT."
Very informative concerning the misleading so called 'liberal' media and their collaborators - Url.: http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog...s-and- light.htm
Please, feel free to forward, post, publish, etc.
(*) Gabriele Zamparini is an independent filmmaker and freelance writer living in London. He's the producer and director of the documentaries XXI CENTURY and The Peace! DVD and author of American Voices of Dissent (Paradigm Publishers). He can be reached at info@thecatsdream.com - More about him and his work on http://TheCatsDream.com
FPF-references:
* ROME TRIBUNAL ON WAR CRIMES AND MEDIA: Held Guilty of Deception - The tribunal said mainstream media reportage on Iraq also violated article six of the Nuremberg Tribunal (set up to try Nazi crimes) which states: "Leaders, organisers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes (crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity) are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such a plan." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/68jws
STRONGLY RELATED LINKS - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gkgrb
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/u...ode/17/ 107.html
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
National Security Study Memorandum 219
US-Iran Agreement on Cooperation in Civil Uses of Atomic Energy (March 14, 1975)
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/libra...sm/ nssm219a.htm
National Security Decision Memorandum 292
US-Iran Nuclear Cooperation (April 22, 1975)
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/libra...sm/ nsdm292a.htm
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/libra...sm/ nsdm292b.htm
National Security Decision Memorandum 324
Negotiation of a Nuclear Agreement with Iran (April 20, 1976)
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/libra...sm/ nsdm324a.htm
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/libra...sm/ nsdm324b.htm
National Security Study Memorandum 238
U.S Policy Toward the Persian Gulf (February 13, 1976)
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/libra...sm/ nssm238a.htm
Same U.S. officials sang a different tune on Iranian nukes in the 1970s
Washington Post (March 27, 2005)
http://groups.google.com/group/ s...53d3a05bc5403c1
U.S. endorsed Iranian plans to build massive nuclear energy industry
http://groups.google.com/group/ s...b0a04b1107d7171
He has plenty of concentration camps in place throughout the US.
http://www.cephas-library.com/ nw...ive_orders.html
Don | 06.20.06 - 8:57 am |
[end quote] - For all who want to know a lot more about this fake icon who led the left astray to the right, the 'givers' to the 'takers? Look who's trapped!
Url.: http://www.newcriterion.com/arch...y03/ chomsky.htm
This is what he said a few hours after the world trade centre was demolished:
http://www.sk.com.br/sk-chom2.html
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Sunday, June 04, 2006
The Justice Department is asking Internet companies to keep records on
U.S. Wants Companies to Keep Web Usage Records
By SAUL HANSELL and ERIC LICHTBLAU
03/02/06 "New York Times" -- -- The Justice Department is asking Internet companies to keep records on the Web-surfing activities of their customers to aid law enforcement, and may propose legislation to force them to do so.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales held a meeting in Washington last Friday where they offered a general proposal on record-keeping to a group of senior executives from Internet companies, said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department. The meeting included representatives from America Online, Microsoft, Google, Verizon and Comcast.
The attorney general has appointed a task force of department officials to explore the issue, and that group is holding another meeting with a broader group of Internet executives today, Mr. Roehrkasse said. The department also met yesterday with a group of privacy experts.
The Justice Department is not asking the Internet companies to give it data about users, but rather to retain information that could be subpoenaed through existing laws and procedures, Mr. Roehrkasse said.
While initial proposals were vague, executives from companies that attended the meeting said they gathered that the department was interested in records that would allow them to identify which individuals visited certain Web sites and possibly conducted searches using certain terms.
It also wants the Internet companies to retain records about whom their users exchange e-mail with, but not the contents of e-mail messages, the executives said. The executives spoke on the condition that they not be identified because they did not want to offend the Justice Department.
The proposal and the initial meeting were first reported by USA Today and CNet News.com.
The department proposed that the records be retained for as long as two years. Most Internet companies discard such records after a few weeks or months.In its current proposal, the department appears to be trying to determine whether Internet companies will voluntarily agree to keep certain information or if it will need to seek legislation to require them to do so.
The request comes as the government has been trying to extend its power to review electronic communications in several ways. The New York Times reported in December that the National Security Agency had gained access to phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of telecommunications companies, and USA Today reported last month that the agency had collected telephone calling records. The Justice Department has subpoenaed information on Internet search patterns — but not the searches of individuals — as it tries to defend a law meant to protect children from pornography.
In a speech in April, Mr. Gonzales said that investigations into child pornography had been hampered because Internet companies had not always kept records that would help prosecutors identify people who traded in illegal images.
"The investigation and prosecution of child predators depends critically on the availability of evidence that is often in the hands of Internet service providers," Mr. Gonzales said in remarks at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va. "This evidence will be available for us to use only if the providers retain the records for a reasonable amount of time," he said.
An executive of one Internet provider that was represented at the first meeting said Mr. Gonzales began the discussion by showing slides of child pornography from the Internet. But later, one participant asked Mr. Mueller why he was interested in the Internet records. The executive said Mr. Mueller's reply was, "We want this for terrorism."
At the meeting with privacy experts yesterday, Justice Department officials focused on wanting to retain the records for use in child pornography and terrorism investigations. But they also talked of their value in investigating other crimes like intellectual property theft and fraud, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, who attended the session.
"It was clear that they would go beyond kiddie porn and terrorism and use it for general law enforcement," Mr. Rotenberg said.
Kate Dean, the executive director of the United States Internet Service Provider Association, a trade group, said: "When they said they were talking about child pornography, we spent a lot of time developing proposals for what could be done. Now they are talking about a whole different ball of wax."
At the meeting with privacy groups, officials sought to assuage concerns that the retention of the records could compromise the privacy of Americans. But Mr. Rotenberg said he left with lingering concerns.
"This is a sharp departure from current practice," he said. "Data retention is an open-ended obligation to retain all information on all customers for all purposes, and from a traditional Fourth Amendment perspective, that really turns things upside down."
Executives of several Internet companies that participated in the first meeting said the department's initial proposals seemed expensive and unwieldy.
At the meeting scheduled for today with executives of Internet access companies, Justice Department officials plan to go into more detail about what types of records they would like to see retained and for how long, said a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It will be much more nuts-and-bolts discussions," he said, adding that the department would stop short of offering formal proposals.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13490.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/washington/02records.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
By SAUL HANSELL and ERIC LICHTBLAU
03/02/06 "New York Times" -- -- The Justice Department is asking Internet companies to keep records on the Web-surfing activities of their customers to aid law enforcement, and may propose legislation to force them to do so.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales held a meeting in Washington last Friday where they offered a general proposal on record-keeping to a group of senior executives from Internet companies, said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department. The meeting included representatives from America Online, Microsoft, Google, Verizon and Comcast.
The attorney general has appointed a task force of department officials to explore the issue, and that group is holding another meeting with a broader group of Internet executives today, Mr. Roehrkasse said. The department also met yesterday with a group of privacy experts.
The Justice Department is not asking the Internet companies to give it data about users, but rather to retain information that could be subpoenaed through existing laws and procedures, Mr. Roehrkasse said.
While initial proposals were vague, executives from companies that attended the meeting said they gathered that the department was interested in records that would allow them to identify which individuals visited certain Web sites and possibly conducted searches using certain terms.
It also wants the Internet companies to retain records about whom their users exchange e-mail with, but not the contents of e-mail messages, the executives said. The executives spoke on the condition that they not be identified because they did not want to offend the Justice Department.
The proposal and the initial meeting were first reported by USA Today and CNet News.com.
The department proposed that the records be retained for as long as two years. Most Internet companies discard such records after a few weeks or months.In its current proposal, the department appears to be trying to determine whether Internet companies will voluntarily agree to keep certain information or if it will need to seek legislation to require them to do so.
The request comes as the government has been trying to extend its power to review electronic communications in several ways. The New York Times reported in December that the National Security Agency had gained access to phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of telecommunications companies, and USA Today reported last month that the agency had collected telephone calling records. The Justice Department has subpoenaed information on Internet search patterns — but not the searches of individuals — as it tries to defend a law meant to protect children from pornography.
In a speech in April, Mr. Gonzales said that investigations into child pornography had been hampered because Internet companies had not always kept records that would help prosecutors identify people who traded in illegal images.
"The investigation and prosecution of child predators depends critically on the availability of evidence that is often in the hands of Internet service providers," Mr. Gonzales said in remarks at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va. "This evidence will be available for us to use only if the providers retain the records for a reasonable amount of time," he said.
An executive of one Internet provider that was represented at the first meeting said Mr. Gonzales began the discussion by showing slides of child pornography from the Internet. But later, one participant asked Mr. Mueller why he was interested in the Internet records. The executive said Mr. Mueller's reply was, "We want this for terrorism."
At the meeting with privacy experts yesterday, Justice Department officials focused on wanting to retain the records for use in child pornography and terrorism investigations. But they also talked of their value in investigating other crimes like intellectual property theft and fraud, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, who attended the session.
"It was clear that they would go beyond kiddie porn and terrorism and use it for general law enforcement," Mr. Rotenberg said.
Kate Dean, the executive director of the United States Internet Service Provider Association, a trade group, said: "When they said they were talking about child pornography, we spent a lot of time developing proposals for what could be done. Now they are talking about a whole different ball of wax."
At the meeting with privacy groups, officials sought to assuage concerns that the retention of the records could compromise the privacy of Americans. But Mr. Rotenberg said he left with lingering concerns.
"This is a sharp departure from current practice," he said. "Data retention is an open-ended obligation to retain all information on all customers for all purposes, and from a traditional Fourth Amendment perspective, that really turns things upside down."
Executives of several Internet companies that participated in the first meeting said the department's initial proposals seemed expensive and unwieldy.
At the meeting scheduled for today with executives of Internet access companies, Justice Department officials plan to go into more detail about what types of records they would like to see retained and for how long, said a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It will be much more nuts-and-bolts discussions," he said, adding that the department would stop short of offering formal proposals.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13490.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/washington/02records.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Japan: Government eyeing financial sanctions on Iran
Government eyeing financial sanctions on Iran
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The government is considering imposing financial sanctions on Iran if it continues to reject demands from world powers, including the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, that it scrap its nuclear program, including uranium enrichment, sources said Saturday.
The government would ban the remittance of money from Japan to Iran under the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law if Iran refuses to comply with the demands, the sources said.
Japan has maintained a stance of seeking a diplomatic solution to the dispute over Iran's nuclear problem. But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday expressed his intention to reject the offer of a package of incentives for Iran, agreed by the five Security Council members and Germany, in return for his country ending its uranium enrichment activities.
The government has therefore started discussing the imposition of financial sanctions.
A senior Foreign Ministry official said, "It would be impossible for Japan to be the sole country to oppose sanctions declared by the United Nations or the U.S.-led 'coalition of the willing.'"
High-ranking officials from Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States met in London in late May to discuss the Iran nuclear problem and possible mechanisms for imposing sanctions on Tehran.
Another senior Foreign Ministry official said, "Japan has been discussing with the United States at various levels, through the London meeting and on other occasions, the scope of a ban by Japan on [financial] transactions with Iran if sanctions were to be imposed on the country."
If Tokyo participates in the sanctions, it is possible that Tehran would retaliate by halting crude oil exports.
That would have serious implications for the Japanese economy because this country depends on Iran for about 15 percent of its crude oil imports.
In addition, the imposition of sanctions likely would hamper the joint development of the Azadegan oil field in Iran by the two nations.
In spite of such concerns, the government is considering financial sanctions against Iran because the United States has been increasingly critical of Japan's stance on the Iran crisis.
A high-ranking U.S. government official said Japan was being too soft on Iran because it attaches too much importance to its economic interests.
Another senior Foreign Ministry official said: "If Japan demands that North Korea stop its nuclear development program but continues to take a soft line toward Iran, that would be seen by the international community as a double standard. As things stand, Japan is setting a bad example to the international community."
But Japan's participation in sanctions against Iran is still seen as the worst-case scenario.
The government remains hopeful that a solution to the dispute can be found through diplomatic means, the sources said.
(Jun. 4, 2006) http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20060604TDY01002.htm
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The government is considering imposing financial sanctions on Iran if it continues to reject demands from world powers, including the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, that it scrap its nuclear program, including uranium enrichment, sources said Saturday.
The government would ban the remittance of money from Japan to Iran under the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law if Iran refuses to comply with the demands, the sources said.
Japan has maintained a stance of seeking a diplomatic solution to the dispute over Iran's nuclear problem. But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday expressed his intention to reject the offer of a package of incentives for Iran, agreed by the five Security Council members and Germany, in return for his country ending its uranium enrichment activities.
The government has therefore started discussing the imposition of financial sanctions.
A senior Foreign Ministry official said, "It would be impossible for Japan to be the sole country to oppose sanctions declared by the United Nations or the U.S.-led 'coalition of the willing.'"
High-ranking officials from Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States met in London in late May to discuss the Iran nuclear problem and possible mechanisms for imposing sanctions on Tehran.
Another senior Foreign Ministry official said, "Japan has been discussing with the United States at various levels, through the London meeting and on other occasions, the scope of a ban by Japan on [financial] transactions with Iran if sanctions were to be imposed on the country."
If Tokyo participates in the sanctions, it is possible that Tehran would retaliate by halting crude oil exports.
That would have serious implications for the Japanese economy because this country depends on Iran for about 15 percent of its crude oil imports.
In addition, the imposition of sanctions likely would hamper the joint development of the Azadegan oil field in Iran by the two nations.
In spite of such concerns, the government is considering financial sanctions against Iran because the United States has been increasingly critical of Japan's stance on the Iran crisis.
A high-ranking U.S. government official said Japan was being too soft on Iran because it attaches too much importance to its economic interests.
Another senior Foreign Ministry official said: "If Japan demands that North Korea stop its nuclear development program but continues to take a soft line toward Iran, that would be seen by the international community as a double standard. As things stand, Japan is setting a bad example to the international community."
But Japan's participation in sanctions against Iran is still seen as the worst-case scenario.
The government remains hopeful that a solution to the dispute can be found through diplomatic means, the sources said.
(Jun. 4, 2006) http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20060604TDY01002.htm
The shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq
http://www.worldsocialism.org/
The shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave? The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of America's army of the slums go further? By Robert Fisk06/03/06 "The Independent" -- -- I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."What kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Just who is doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions. It's no good saying "a few bad apples." All occupation armies are corrupted. But do they all commit war crimes? The Algerians are still uncovering the mass graves left by the French paras who liquidated whole villages. We know of the rapist-killers of the Russian army in Chechnya. We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched while their proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700 Palestinians. And of course the words My Lai are now uttered again. Yes, the Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.I suspect part of the problem is that we never really cared about Iraqis, which is why we refused to count their dead. Once the Iraqis turned upon the army of occupation with their roadside bombs and suicide cars, they became Arab "gooks," the evil sub-humans whom the Americans once identified in Vietnam. Get a president to tell us that we are fighting evil and one day we will wake to find that a child has horns, a baby has cloven feet. Remind yourself these people are Muslims and they can all become little Mohamed Attas. Killing a roomful of civilians is only a step further from all those promiscuous air strikes that we are told kill 'terrorists" but which all too often turn out to be a wedding party or -- as in Afghanistan -- a mixture of "terrorists" and children or, as we are soon to hear, no doubt, "terrorist children."In a way, we reporters are also to blame. Unable to venture outside Baghdad -- or around Baghdad itself -- Iraq's vastness has fallen under a thick, all-consuming shadow. We might occasionally notice sparks in the night -- a Haditha or two in the desert -- but we remain meekly cataloguing the numbers of "terrorists" supposedly scored in remote corners of Mesopotamia. For fear of the insurgent's knife, we can no longer investigate. And the Americans like it that way.I think it becomes a habit, this sort of thing. Already the horrors of Abu Ghraib are shrugged away. It was abuse, not torture. And then up pops a junior officer in the United States charged for killing an Iraqi army general by stuffing him upside down in a sleeping bag and sitting on his chest. And again, it gets few headlines. Who cares if another Iraqi bites the dust? Aren't they trying to kill our boys who are out there fighting terror. For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the brightest, the most honorable of creatures, doing endless battle with the killers of Sept. 11 or July 7 because we love our country and our people -- but not other people -- so much. And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as Crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to bring them democracy. I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them
Robert Fisk latest book is "The Great War for Civilisation : The Conquest of the Middle East" © 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13491.htm
The shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave? The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of America's army of the slums go further? By Robert Fisk06/03/06 "The Independent" -- -- I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."What kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Just who is doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions. It's no good saying "a few bad apples." All occupation armies are corrupted. But do they all commit war crimes? The Algerians are still uncovering the mass graves left by the French paras who liquidated whole villages. We know of the rapist-killers of the Russian army in Chechnya. We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched while their proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700 Palestinians. And of course the words My Lai are now uttered again. Yes, the Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.I suspect part of the problem is that we never really cared about Iraqis, which is why we refused to count their dead. Once the Iraqis turned upon the army of occupation with their roadside bombs and suicide cars, they became Arab "gooks," the evil sub-humans whom the Americans once identified in Vietnam. Get a president to tell us that we are fighting evil and one day we will wake to find that a child has horns, a baby has cloven feet. Remind yourself these people are Muslims and they can all become little Mohamed Attas. Killing a roomful of civilians is only a step further from all those promiscuous air strikes that we are told kill 'terrorists" but which all too often turn out to be a wedding party or -- as in Afghanistan -- a mixture of "terrorists" and children or, as we are soon to hear, no doubt, "terrorist children."In a way, we reporters are also to blame. Unable to venture outside Baghdad -- or around Baghdad itself -- Iraq's vastness has fallen under a thick, all-consuming shadow. We might occasionally notice sparks in the night -- a Haditha or two in the desert -- but we remain meekly cataloguing the numbers of "terrorists" supposedly scored in remote corners of Mesopotamia. For fear of the insurgent's knife, we can no longer investigate. And the Americans like it that way.I think it becomes a habit, this sort of thing. Already the horrors of Abu Ghraib are shrugged away. It was abuse, not torture. And then up pops a junior officer in the United States charged for killing an Iraqi army general by stuffing him upside down in a sleeping bag and sitting on his chest. And again, it gets few headlines. Who cares if another Iraqi bites the dust? Aren't they trying to kill our boys who are out there fighting terror. For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the brightest, the most honorable of creatures, doing endless battle with the killers of Sept. 11 or July 7 because we love our country and our people -- but not other people -- so much. And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as Crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to bring them democracy. I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them
Robert Fisk latest book is "The Great War for Civilisation : The Conquest of the Middle East" © 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13491.htm
Normalizing the Unthinkable
Normalizing the UnthinkableJohn Pilger, Robert Fisk, Charlie Glass, and Seymour Hersh on the failure of the world’s pressBy Sophie McNeill06/03/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The late journalist Edward R. Murrow might well have been rolling in his grave on April 21. That’s because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a lecture that day in Washington, DC to journalists at the Department of State’s official Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists. For the Bush administration to use the memory of a person who stood up to government propaganda is ironic to say the least. Secretary Rice told the assembled journalists that “without a free press to report on the activities of government, to ask questions of officials, to be a place where citizens can express themselves, democracy simply couldn’t work.”One week earlier in New York City, Columbia University hosted a panel on the state of the world’s media that would have been more in Murrow’s style than the State Department-run symposium. Reporter and filmmaker John Pilger, British Middle East correspondent for the Independent Robert Fisk, freelance reporter Charlie Glass, and investigative journalist for the New Yorker Seymour Hersh appeared together at this April 14 event.Before the afternoon panel began, I met up with John Pilger at his hotel. He’d just flown in from London and was only in New York for the panel before flying to Caracas, Venezuela the next day. A journalist for over 30 years, Pilger has reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Palestine, and Iraq—to name a few of the countries to which his investigative reporting and filmmaking had taken him. Pilger told me that he’d never been as concerned about the state of the media as he was today. “I think there’s a lot of reasons to be very concerned about the information or the lack of information that we get. There’s never been such an interest, more than an interest, almost an obsession, in controlling what journalists have to say.”Despite the fact that the war in Iraq is reported daily in most U.S. newspapers and networks around the world, Pilger didn’t think the world’s press accurately conveyed the reality of life for Iraqi civilians. “We get the illusion that we are seeing what might be happening in Iraq. But what we’re getting is a massive censorship by omission; so much is being left out,” he said. “We have a situation in Iraq where well over 100,000 civilians have been killed and we have virtually no pictures. The control of that by the Pentagon has been quite brilliant. And as a result we have no idea of the extent of civilians suffering in that country.”I asked Pilger what the untold story of Iraq was that’s just not getting through. “Well, the untold story of Iraq should be obvious,” Pilger said. “But it never is. The untold story of Vietnam was that it was an invasion and that huge numbers of civilians were killed. And in effect it was a war against civilians and that was never told and that’s exactly true of Iraq.”With the majority of the world’s press holed up behind 4.5 miles of concrete barrier in the green zone, it seems impossible for the standard of reporting to improve anytime in the near future. I asked Pilger if he blamed journalists for not wanting to put their lives at risk? “No, I can’t,” he said. “But I don’t see the point of being in the green zone. I don’t see the point of wearing a flak jacket and standing in a hotel in a fortress guarded by an invader.“But there have been journalists—and others—who have actually gone with the insurgents; who have reported about them. One of them, for instance, is a young woman named Jo Wilding, a British human rights worker. She was in Fallujah all through that first attack in 2004. Jo Wilding’s dispatches were some of the most extraordinary I’ve read, but they were never published anywhere.”Pilger said the mainstream press needs to get over its hang up of “our man in Baghdad” and prioritize whatever information can be obtained by whoever is brave enough or has the best contacts. “There are sources of information for what is happening inside Iraq. Most of them are on the web. I think those who give a damn in the mainstream really have to look at those sources and surrender their prejudice about them and say we need that reporter’s work because he or she has told us something we can’t possibly get ourselves. And I think that’s the only way we will really serve the public.”We had talked too long and had to quickly jump in a cab to make it to the panel on time. The hall was packed with university students, professors, and the public. Charlie GlassThe event quickly got underway with Charlie Glass as the first speaker. A former ABC America correspondent in the Middle East, Glass drew laughs from the crowd when comparing his experience to the other panelists. “When I began journalism I approached it in the way a lot of young naïve people do, in that it was a vocation, a higher calling to tell the truth. My three colleagues up here have managed to do that throughout their careers. I tried very hard to do that throughout my career…but I worked for an American network. It’s not easy,” joked Glass. Glass spoke about the censorship he had encountered as an American TV reporter covering the Middle East, referring to a story he filed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. There had been rumors of Israeli Shin Bath death squads murdering Lebanese civilians in the South and Glass and his crew had managed to film the evidence behind these killings. “We nailed this story. We folded one of the death squads. We got to the palace where they had assassinated a man half an hour after he had been killed. We filmed it. We filmed the eyewitness. We filmed UN soldiers, who had seen the same things, discussing it,” recalled Glass. “ABC news didn’t broadcast it. But they won’t tell you they’re not going to broadcast it because they’re afraid of losing advertising. They won’t tell you they won’t broadcast it because they’re afraid of the public reaction. They tell you they just didn’t have room that night or the next night or the next night. And that’s just the way it is. That is why very few people in this country have any idea what’s going on in the Middle East.”Glass believes this kind of censorship has led to a chasm of misunderstanding within the U.S. public. “You don’t understand what’s been going on in Iraq because you’ve been lied to again. Just like you were in Vietnam. Just like you were in Lebanon and just like you were in the West Bank and Gaza,” he said. “Nobody has a clue why things went wrong in Iraq. Well, I’ll tell you why. They were always going to go wrong in Iraq. It wasn’t because Bremer screwed up. It wasn’t because the U.S. pilfered the Iraqi treasury, which is true. It wasn’t because some soldiers misbehaved and shot some people in cars. It was because it could never go right in Iraq,” Glass insisted. “The U.S. was not trusted by any Iraqi because the U.S. history in Iraq was so reprehensible—from the betrayal of the Kurds in 1975 when Henry Kissinger sold them out and they were massacred in the tens of thousands by Saddam, from the time they aided Saddam during the Iran/Iraq war, from the time they betrayed the Kurdish and Shia rebellions in 1991, from the sanctions regime that followed.“Who would trust a power to liberate them who had already behaved like that? It isn’t a question of what happened after; it’s a question of what happened before. We had an obligation to tell what happened before and we didn’t,” Glass said, before pausing to take a moment. “I’ve lost my vocation. I actually don’t really like this profession anymore,” Glass said regrettably.Robert FiskNext to speak was Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, arguably the world’s most experienced Western reporter in the region. Fisk pulled out a copy of the New York Times and spread it out on the lectern. “This is from this morning’s paper: Al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq gets encouragement from HQ,” Fisk read aloud. “An interior minister official said, officials said, the American military said, the Iraqi government said, some American officials here observed, and some military officials have said, two American intelligence officials said, one Pakistani official said, and I’ve only got to column two,” Fisk exclaimed. “I’ve always believed that your major newspaper should be called ‘American Officials Say.’ Then you can just scrap all the reporting and have the Pentagon talking directly.”Fisk expressed outrage at the semantics of language that occurs within much of the reporting in the Middle East. “In the American press the occupied Palestinian territories become the disputed territories, a colony becomes a settlement or a neighborhood or an outpost. Here semantically, we are constantly degrading the reasons for Palestinian anger. Over and over again the wall becomes a fence. Like the Berlin fence— had it been built by the Israelis, that’s what it would have been called. Then for anyone who doesn’t know the real semantics of this conflict, the Palestinians are generically violent. I mean who would ever protest over a garden fence or a neighborhood? The purpose of this kind of journalism is to diminish the real reasons behind the Middle East conflict.”Fisk went on to explain why he thinks the manipulation of language in reporting skews the truth. “We have another phrase we are introducing now. Have you noticed how these extraordinary creatures keep popping up in reports from Baghdad? ‘Men in police uniform’ took part in the kidnapping. ‘Men in police uniform’ abducted Margaret Hassan. ‘Men in army uniform’ besieged police stations,” Fisk said, somewhat exasperated. “Now do the reporters writing this garbage actually think there is a warehouse in Fallujah with eight thousand made to measure police uniforms for insurgents?” Fisk asked, then answered. “Of course there aren’t, they are the policemen.”Fisk’s main criticism was reserved for television coverage of the conflict. “Television connives at war because it will not show you the reality. If an Iraqi is lucky enough to die in a romantic position he will get on the air,” Fisk said. He then added, “But if he doesn’t have a head on or if he is like most of the victims, torn to bits, you will not see him.”Fisk talked of his television colleague’s pictures being routinely censored by producers and editors back home. “I’ve heard them say this down the line, ‘It’s pornographic to show these pictures. We’ve got people at breakfast time; they will be puking over their cornflakes... We can’t show this.’ My favorite one is ‘We’ve got to respect the dead.’ We can kill them as much as we want, but once they’re dead we’ve got to respect them, right? And so you will be shielded from this war. You will be shielded from this reality.”Fisk believes having journalists holed up in the green zone suits the military forces in Iraq. “The Americans, and to a lesser extent the British, like it this way. They do not want us moving around. They do not want us going to the mortuaries and counting the dead.” Fisk told of an experience he had when visiting a Baghdad mortuary in August 2005. “The mortuary officials, against the law of Iraq, which doesn’t count for much at the moment, let me see the Ministry of Health computer that American and British officials have ordered the ministry not to allow Western journalists access to…which showed that in July alone last year 1,100 Iraqis had died by violence, just in Baghdad.”Fisk challenged the standard reporting conventions hammered into journalism student’s heads around the world. “There’s one that comes up from the journalism school system which is you’ve got to give equal time to both sides,” explained Fisk. “To which I say well, if you were reporting the slave trade in the 18th century, would you give equal time to the slave ship captain? No. If you’re covering the liberation of a Nazi camp, do you give equal time to the SS spokesman? No. When I covered a Palestinian suicide bombing of a restaurant in Israeli west Jerusalem in August 2001, did I give equal time to the Islamic jihad spokesman? No. When 1,700 Palestinians were slaughtered in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, did I give equal time to the Israeli spokesman, who of course was representing an army who watched the massacre as its Lebanese Phalangist allies carried it out? No. Journalists should be on the side of the victims,” Fisk said.He closed with a sober warning to viewers and readers closely following the Iraq war coverage. “We have a real disaster on our hands because the American project in Iraq is dead and don’t believe anything anyone else tells you in any newspaper. It is a catastrophe and every reporter working in Iraq knows it, but they don’t all tell you that,” Fisk said, pausing. “And that is our shame.”John PilgerJohn Pilger addressed the audience next by challenging the very idea that America and its allies are at war. “We are not at war. Instead, American and British troops are fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem and grief...but you wouldn’t know it. Where are the pictures of these atrocities?”Pilger referred to the first wars he covered, Vietnam and Cambodia, and compared the role of journalists then to today. “The invasion of Vietnam was deliberate and calculated—as were policies and strategies that bordered on genocide and were designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes. Experimental weapons were used against civilians. All of this was rarely news. The unspoken task of the reporter in Vietnam, as it was in Korea, was to normalize the unthinkable. And that has not changed.” Pilger went on to explain his reaction to current reporting of events in Iraq. “The other day, on the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader described the invasion as a ‘miscalculation.’ Not illegal. Not unprovoked. Not based on lies. But a miscalculation. Thus, the unthinkable is normalized. By concentrating on military pronouncements. By making it seem like it is a respectable war, you normalize what is the unthinkable. And the unthinkable is a war against civilians. It’s a war that has claimed tens of thousands of people. There are estimates that put it well over 100,000. When journalists report it as a respectable geopolitical act and promote the idea that it was to bring democracy to this country, then they’re normalizing the unthinkable.”Pilger turned his attention to the BBC. Generally accepted worldwide as a reputable and independent source of information, Pilger rejected this notion outright. “In Britain, where I live, the BBC, which promotes itself as a sort of nirvana of objectivity and impartiality and truth, has blood all over its corporate hands.” Pilger cited a study conducted by the journalism school of the University College in Cardiff that found in the lead up to the war, 90 percent of the BBC’s references to weapons of mass destruction suggested Saddam Hussein actually possessed them.Pilger added, “We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI-6, the secret intelligence service. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents planted stories about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fake. But that’s not the point. The point is that the role of MI-6 was quite unnecessary because a systematic media self-censorship produced the same result.”To Pilger the most significant way journalists are used by government is in what he calls a “softening up process” before planned military action. “We soften them up by dehumanizing them. Currently journalists are softening up Iran, Syria, and Venezuela,” Pilger said. “A few weeks ago Channel 4 News in Britain, regarded as a good liberal news service, carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the State Department. The reporter presented President Chavez of Venezuela as a cartoon character, a sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin way disguised a man, and I quote, ‘in danger of joining a rogues gallery of dictators and despots—Washington’s latest Latin nightmare.’“Rumsfeld was allowed to call Chavez ‘Hitler’ unchallenged. According to the reporter, Venezuela under Chavez was helping Iran develop nuclear weapons. No evidence was given for this bullshit.” He cited a recent report by the media watchdog FAIR, which found that 95 percent of the 100 media commentaries surveyed expressed hostility to Chavez, with terms such as “dictator,” “strongman,” and “demagogue” regularly used in publications such as the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. “The softening-up of Venezuela is well advanced in the United States. So that if or when the Bush administration launches Operation Bilbao, a contingent plan to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela, who will care? We will have only the media version, another lousy demagogue got what was coming to him. A triumph of censorship by omission and by journalism,” he concluded. Seymour HershThe last speaker, Seymour Hersh, had just published his report on the Bush administration’s secret plans for an attack on Iran, which he spoke about. “Here we’ve got a situation, which is really unique in our history. This is a president who is completely inured to the press. It doesn’t matter what we write or say. He has got his own vision, whether he’s talking to God or doing things on behalf of what his father didn’t do or whatever it is. He has his own messianic view of what to do and he’s not done,” warned Hersh.The moderator questioned Hersh about his use of anonymous sources and the possibility that his Iran story was from a government plant. “It’s an appropriate question,” he remarked. “People would say are you part of the process, trying to put pressure on the Iranians by using psychological warfare and planting the story? I really wish they had that kind of cunning…that they would think in a Kissingerian way,” he laughed. “But the fact is with George Bush, it’s been very consistent. What you see is what you get.”“It was not a plant,” Hersh explained. “This [report] came from people willing to take bullets for us… willing to put their lives on the line, who understand combat and who are scared to death about this guy in the White House.” Hersh went on to warn the audience about what he thought would happen with the Bush administration and Iran; “Folks, don’t bet against it because he’s probably going to do it; because somebody up there is telling him this is the right thing to do.”Hersh considered the damning words of his colleagues. “Yes, it’s important to beat up on us. As usual we deserve it. As usual we failed you totally,” Hersh remarked wearily. “But above and beyond all that, folks, by my count there are something like 1,011 days left in the reign of King George the Lesser and that is the bad news. But there is good news. And the good news is that tomorrow when we wake up there will be one less day.”To a large round of applause, the afternoon ended. I asked Pilger his final thoughts. He paused and then replied, “Journalists, like politicians, like anybody really, should be called to account for the consequences of their actions. Journalists have played a critical role in sustaining wars. Starting them and sustaining them. And we have to face that discussion. There’s nothing wrong with journalism, it’s a wonderful privilege, it’s a craft actually, and I’m very proud to be a journalist. But it’s the way it’s practiced. It’s as if it has been hijacked by corporatism and we should take it back.” Sophie McNeill is a freelance video journalist whose work regularly appears on Australia’s SBS Television “Dateline” program. She lives in New York
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13492.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13492.htm
The Pentagon's Shaky Self-Exoneration
Return to Ishaqi: The Pentagon's Shaky Self-Exoneration By Chris Floyd 06/03/06 "Empire Burlesque" -- - It seems that the Pentagon, that veritable fount of veracity, has probed itself for the alleged execution-style slaying of civilians in Ishaqi, and found that the operation -- which left 11 civilians dead, including five children under the age of five -- was in fact an exemplary feat of arms, strictly by the book. Everything happened pretty much the way they originally said it happened: soldiers seeking a dastardly al-Qaeda operative (now more circumspectly described as a man suspected of being an al-Qaeda operative) took fire during the pursuit and responded with heavy force: air power and ground assault on the suspect's redoubt, which just happened to be someone's house. In the course of the textbook op, which we're told killed the al-Qaednik and a local bombmaker, there were also three "noncombatant" deaths, and an estimated nine "collateral deaths." (The difference between these two categories is not explained. And of course it doesn't matter to the innocent people killed; whether they are "non-combatants" or "collaterals," they're still just as dead. No doubt there are strict bureaucratic guidelines behind these distinctions.) These deaths are regrettable, of course, but such things happen as unintended consequences of noble causes, and no doubt there will be a bit of loose change doled out to the innocent victims' families.So that's that then. Nothing to see here, time to move on... And you know, I really wish we could. No one here takes any pleasure or satisfaction from reports of yet another egregious failure of the human spirit, yet another eruption of the bestiality that lies buried in the mud of our brains. This is true in any case, anywhere, but it is doubly true if the crimes are done in the name of your own country. And any time that such a report turns out to be mistaken is a cause for joy.By the way, this is what the powerful -- and their sycophants -- always fail to understand: no genuine dissident is happy about dissenting. You dissent because you see injustice, crime, corruption and needless death being wrought by the power structures of your own society. You dissent because so many lies have been forced down your throat, and you just want to know the truth, as far as it can be known, you just want to speak the truth, whatever it may be. You dissent because of the reality that you see. And this is a painful thing; it's like watching a family member go bad, like learning your own father is a killer, that your mother is thief. No one wants to believe evil of their own country, their own society; but sometimes the very ideals that you were given by your society -- a commitment to justice, to truth, the belief in the inherent worth and moral agency of every individual human being -- compels you to confront the reality of the crimes and corruption of the leaders and institutions of that same society.It isn't fun; there's no pleasure in it. Especially if, with Dostoevsky, you believe that "each is responsible for all," that you yourself are implicated in every failure of humanity. Bob Dylan captured the essence of this kind of dissent well when he sang of the great iconoclast, Lenny Bruce:
He fought a war on a battlefieldWhere every victory hurts. So yes, it would be nice to be able to accept at face value the Pentagon's exonerating version of the incident at Ishaqi. (Relatively speaking, of course; that is to say, in the murderous context of the vast atrocity that is the Iraq war itself, it would be better to accept the Pentagon's assertion that the deaths of up these innocent people were simply the inevitable and unintended by-product of urban warfare, rather than the more grisly alternative. It would be good to have this slight mitigation of the general horror.) But a commitment to the truth -- and a refusal to succumb to historical amnesia -- prevents such an automatic acceptance. For this is the same Pentagon that whitewashed the Haditha killings not once, but twice (with two different stories) after the massacre there last year. This is the same Pentagon whose innumerable investigations into itself during these crimeful Bush years have only managed to peel a few "bad apples" plucked from the bottom of the barrel, despite the extraordinarily vast and systematic nature of the regimens of torture and atrocity established by the Bush Administration, as Amnesty International has pointed out in an important new study. Such elaborate systems cannot have been constructed and operated without orders -- direct and implied -- from the very highest reaches of government and the military command. Yet the Pentagon has employed oceans of whitewash to protect the brass, while grudgingly throwing a few bits of cannon fodder and trailer trash -- as the Bushist elite would see them -- on the fire to serve, in the words of Breaker Morant, as "scapegoats of the empire."Thus, in a general sense, you would be foolish to accept the result of any of the Pentagon's self-investigations at face value, without independent corroboration. This kind of cynicism is, again, painful and unpleasant, but it has been forced upon us by the many, many lies that have emanated from that five-sided fortress over many decades. This is not to say that every Pentagon self-exoneration is false or incomplete, or that there are not many honorable military investigators doing sterling -- and thankless -- work. (The current Haditha probe -- although belated, and problematic in many respects, is an example of this.) It's merely acknowledging the indisputable reality of history -- and certainly of the current war -- that the Pentagon brass habitually lie and dissemble and look the other way when it comes to allegations of atrocities by US forces. It's only prudent to reserve judgment on any institution that investigates itself for wrongdoing. Or put it this way: if you're ever charged with murder or bank fraud or dope dealing or tax dodging, ask the cops if you can investigate yourself, and see what they say.But the Ishaqi exoneration warrants skepticism not only in this general sense, but also in its particulars. From press accounts of the report, it largely reiterates the Pentagon's original storyline, while enlarging the death count from the original "four civilians, including one child," which it had held to until this week, when the Haditha story spilled out. And the report apparently just dismisses out of hand the large amount of credible evidence that contradicts the Pentagon's latest story. First is the photographic evidence: pictures taken of the aftermath by Agence France Presse, and a video that emerged this week on BBC. These clearly dispute the Pentagon's account, which holds that the house was first raked with gunfire, then attack by helicopter gunships, then finally bombed by American jets: a massive barrage of firepower that left the house in ruins. But the video shows that part of the house was left standing. The photographs, which have been widely available for months, show five dead children, one of them only a few months old. They have been laid out by grieving relatives. Their bodies show no signs of having been ripped up or damaged in the course of an all-out air and ground assault; as the BBC's John Simpson points out, they had not been crushed by the collapse of the house, as the Pentagon claimed. Instead, they are unmarked, their clothes dusty but in most cases untorn. In the photographs I saw, one child clearly has blood oozing from the back of her head, while the baby has a hole in his forehead, and other damage to his face. The other children are laid on their back, with their wounds invisible, their bodies remarkably whole. Simpson, shown viewing the film, said it was clear that the children had been shot. Second is the testimony of the villagers, and of two officials of the U.S.-backed Iraqi police, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein. These are men who risk their lives by their cooperation with the Coalition. The villagers say soldiers entered the house and killed the occupants; the house was later hit by the helicopter then bombed, apparently to cover up the killings, some of the villagers surmised. The Iraqi police said "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head." Later, a Knight-Ridder reporter saw a preliminary report indicating that the 11 victims had multiple wounds. This tallies with Simpson's viewing, which showed that one of the dead children had been shot in the side. Everyone who saw or examined the bodies agreed that the victims had been shot, most likely by bullets from the large pile of American-issue cartridges found inside the house, which can also be seen on the video.Also dismissed by the Pentagon is the testimony of Ahmed Khalaf, brother of house's owner, who told AP that nine of the victims were family members and two were visitors, adding, "the killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children. The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."Not a single villager, not a single local police official agrees with the Pentagon version of the attack. Are they all lying, even the "collaborators" with the occupation? Not likely. Are they confused or uncertain about the exact sequence of events? Naturally; the only Iraqis who know exactly what happened in that house are dead. Are there discrepancies between the early reports on the bodies' conditions, i.e., where they all shot in the head, or were some shot in other parts of their bodies, and were they all bound before they were shot, or just some of them, or perhaps none of them? Yes, there are discrepancies. The video, seen in its incomplete form on BBC, does not clearly bear out the charge that the victims had been bound. The video doesn't show all the victims, but those being pulled from the house do not appear to be bound, although in the version I saw, most of the bodies shown had already been wrapped in rugs or blankets. But is there any disputing the photographic evidence that the victims, particularly the children, were shot, not crushed by the collapsing walls? No, this reality cannot be denied, despite the Pentagon's report. Is there any disputing the evidence that the children were killed by single shots, and not, say, riddled with bullets in the course of a cross-fire between US forces and insurgents? No, this reality cannot be denied either. Someone fired a single shot into the bodies of every child on display in the photographs, which were taken by a Western news agency, and corroborated by a representative of another Western news agency, Associated Press, who was also on the scene after the attack.What can we conclude from all this? That there was indeed a Haditha-style execution of the innocent at Ishaqi? No; the limited amount of evidence that we can gather on the incident -- at a distance, from press reports -- does not on its face categorically prove a deliberate massacre. To categorically prove such an allegation -- or categorically disprove it -- would require a thorough, completely independent investigation. We can say that the available evidence gives many deeply troubling indications that some kind of atrocity indeed occurred at Ishaqi. And we can say that key portions of the Pentagon's self-exoneration are flatly contradicted by photographic evidence, and also by the credible testimony from villagers, US-backed Iraqi officials and Western news agencies (including Reuters, Knight-Ridder, AFP and AP) as to the nature of the victims' fatal wounds. The Pentagon's hastily-announced report on Ishaqi does not answer all the questions and charges raised by the incident; indeed, it seems not to have even addressed some of them. The whole truth of what happened in the village will remain uncertain until it can be investigated by an independent, impartial and authoritative agency. And we know this will never happen.Finally, let's put the incident in its proper context by quoting the conclusion from our original post on Ishaqi:
We know that the American troops who caused the deaths of these children – either by tying them up and shooting them, an unspeakable atrocity, or else "merely" by storming or bombing a house full of civilians in a night raid "with both air and ground assets" – were sent to Iraq on a demonstrably false mission to "disarm" weapons that did not exist and take revenge for 9/11 on a nation that had nothing to do with the attack. And we now know that the White House – and George W. Bush specifically – knew all along that the intelligence did not and could not support the public case he had made for the war.We know that the only reason that this dead baby has his arm frozen to his lifeless face is that three years ago this week, George W. Bush gave the order to begin the unprovoked, unjust and unnecessary invasion of Iraq. He hasn't fired a single shot or launched a single missile; he hasn't tortured or killed any prisoners; he hasn't kidnapped or beheaded civilians or planted bombs along roadsides, in mosques or marketplaces. Yet every single atrocity of the war – on both sides – and every single death caused by the war, and every act of religious repression perpetrated by the extremist sects empowered by the war, is the direct result of the decision made by George W. Bush three years ago. Nothing he says can change this fact; nothing he does, or causes to be done, for good or ill, can wash the blood of these children – and the tens of thousands of other innocent civilians killed in the war – from his hands. *Note: "Ishaqi" now seems to be the preferred transliteration of the town''s name. In our earlier reports, we used "Isahaqi," one of several versions that came out in the early news reports.*UPDATE: The BBC reports this afternoon that the Iraqi government has officially rejected the Pentagon's investigation into the Ishaqi killings. Excerpt:
The Iraqi government has rejected the findings of a US military investigation into the deaths of 11 civilians in the village of Ishaqi, north of Baghdad.A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said the report, which cleared the US soldiers of wrongdoing, was unfair. The government will demand an apology and compensation, the spokesman said.
Visit Chris Floyds Website www.chris-floyd.com
He fought a war on a battlefieldWhere every victory hurts. So yes, it would be nice to be able to accept at face value the Pentagon's exonerating version of the incident at Ishaqi. (Relatively speaking, of course; that is to say, in the murderous context of the vast atrocity that is the Iraq war itself, it would be better to accept the Pentagon's assertion that the deaths of up these innocent people were simply the inevitable and unintended by-product of urban warfare, rather than the more grisly alternative. It would be good to have this slight mitigation of the general horror.) But a commitment to the truth -- and a refusal to succumb to historical amnesia -- prevents such an automatic acceptance. For this is the same Pentagon that whitewashed the Haditha killings not once, but twice (with two different stories) after the massacre there last year. This is the same Pentagon whose innumerable investigations into itself during these crimeful Bush years have only managed to peel a few "bad apples" plucked from the bottom of the barrel, despite the extraordinarily vast and systematic nature of the regimens of torture and atrocity established by the Bush Administration, as Amnesty International has pointed out in an important new study. Such elaborate systems cannot have been constructed and operated without orders -- direct and implied -- from the very highest reaches of government and the military command. Yet the Pentagon has employed oceans of whitewash to protect the brass, while grudgingly throwing a few bits of cannon fodder and trailer trash -- as the Bushist elite would see them -- on the fire to serve, in the words of Breaker Morant, as "scapegoats of the empire."Thus, in a general sense, you would be foolish to accept the result of any of the Pentagon's self-investigations at face value, without independent corroboration. This kind of cynicism is, again, painful and unpleasant, but it has been forced upon us by the many, many lies that have emanated from that five-sided fortress over many decades. This is not to say that every Pentagon self-exoneration is false or incomplete, or that there are not many honorable military investigators doing sterling -- and thankless -- work. (The current Haditha probe -- although belated, and problematic in many respects, is an example of this.) It's merely acknowledging the indisputable reality of history -- and certainly of the current war -- that the Pentagon brass habitually lie and dissemble and look the other way when it comes to allegations of atrocities by US forces. It's only prudent to reserve judgment on any institution that investigates itself for wrongdoing. Or put it this way: if you're ever charged with murder or bank fraud or dope dealing or tax dodging, ask the cops if you can investigate yourself, and see what they say.But the Ishaqi exoneration warrants skepticism not only in this general sense, but also in its particulars. From press accounts of the report, it largely reiterates the Pentagon's original storyline, while enlarging the death count from the original "four civilians, including one child," which it had held to until this week, when the Haditha story spilled out. And the report apparently just dismisses out of hand the large amount of credible evidence that contradicts the Pentagon's latest story. First is the photographic evidence: pictures taken of the aftermath by Agence France Presse, and a video that emerged this week on BBC. These clearly dispute the Pentagon's account, which holds that the house was first raked with gunfire, then attack by helicopter gunships, then finally bombed by American jets: a massive barrage of firepower that left the house in ruins. But the video shows that part of the house was left standing. The photographs, which have been widely available for months, show five dead children, one of them only a few months old. They have been laid out by grieving relatives. Their bodies show no signs of having been ripped up or damaged in the course of an all-out air and ground assault; as the BBC's John Simpson points out, they had not been crushed by the collapse of the house, as the Pentagon claimed. Instead, they are unmarked, their clothes dusty but in most cases untorn. In the photographs I saw, one child clearly has blood oozing from the back of her head, while the baby has a hole in his forehead, and other damage to his face. The other children are laid on their back, with their wounds invisible, their bodies remarkably whole. Simpson, shown viewing the film, said it was clear that the children had been shot. Second is the testimony of the villagers, and of two officials of the U.S.-backed Iraqi police, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein. These are men who risk their lives by their cooperation with the Coalition. The villagers say soldiers entered the house and killed the occupants; the house was later hit by the helicopter then bombed, apparently to cover up the killings, some of the villagers surmised. The Iraqi police said "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head." Later, a Knight-Ridder reporter saw a preliminary report indicating that the 11 victims had multiple wounds. This tallies with Simpson's viewing, which showed that one of the dead children had been shot in the side. Everyone who saw or examined the bodies agreed that the victims had been shot, most likely by bullets from the large pile of American-issue cartridges found inside the house, which can also be seen on the video.Also dismissed by the Pentagon is the testimony of Ahmed Khalaf, brother of house's owner, who told AP that nine of the victims were family members and two were visitors, adding, "the killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children. The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."Not a single villager, not a single local police official agrees with the Pentagon version of the attack. Are they all lying, even the "collaborators" with the occupation? Not likely. Are they confused or uncertain about the exact sequence of events? Naturally; the only Iraqis who know exactly what happened in that house are dead. Are there discrepancies between the early reports on the bodies' conditions, i.e., where they all shot in the head, or were some shot in other parts of their bodies, and were they all bound before they were shot, or just some of them, or perhaps none of them? Yes, there are discrepancies. The video, seen in its incomplete form on BBC, does not clearly bear out the charge that the victims had been bound. The video doesn't show all the victims, but those being pulled from the house do not appear to be bound, although in the version I saw, most of the bodies shown had already been wrapped in rugs or blankets. But is there any disputing the photographic evidence that the victims, particularly the children, were shot, not crushed by the collapsing walls? No, this reality cannot be denied, despite the Pentagon's report. Is there any disputing the evidence that the children were killed by single shots, and not, say, riddled with bullets in the course of a cross-fire between US forces and insurgents? No, this reality cannot be denied either. Someone fired a single shot into the bodies of every child on display in the photographs, which were taken by a Western news agency, and corroborated by a representative of another Western news agency, Associated Press, who was also on the scene after the attack.What can we conclude from all this? That there was indeed a Haditha-style execution of the innocent at Ishaqi? No; the limited amount of evidence that we can gather on the incident -- at a distance, from press reports -- does not on its face categorically prove a deliberate massacre. To categorically prove such an allegation -- or categorically disprove it -- would require a thorough, completely independent investigation. We can say that the available evidence gives many deeply troubling indications that some kind of atrocity indeed occurred at Ishaqi. And we can say that key portions of the Pentagon's self-exoneration are flatly contradicted by photographic evidence, and also by the credible testimony from villagers, US-backed Iraqi officials and Western news agencies (including Reuters, Knight-Ridder, AFP and AP) as to the nature of the victims' fatal wounds. The Pentagon's hastily-announced report on Ishaqi does not answer all the questions and charges raised by the incident; indeed, it seems not to have even addressed some of them. The whole truth of what happened in the village will remain uncertain until it can be investigated by an independent, impartial and authoritative agency. And we know this will never happen.Finally, let's put the incident in its proper context by quoting the conclusion from our original post on Ishaqi:
We know that the American troops who caused the deaths of these children – either by tying them up and shooting them, an unspeakable atrocity, or else "merely" by storming or bombing a house full of civilians in a night raid "with both air and ground assets" – were sent to Iraq on a demonstrably false mission to "disarm" weapons that did not exist and take revenge for 9/11 on a nation that had nothing to do with the attack. And we now know that the White House – and George W. Bush specifically – knew all along that the intelligence did not and could not support the public case he had made for the war.We know that the only reason that this dead baby has his arm frozen to his lifeless face is that three years ago this week, George W. Bush gave the order to begin the unprovoked, unjust and unnecessary invasion of Iraq. He hasn't fired a single shot or launched a single missile; he hasn't tortured or killed any prisoners; he hasn't kidnapped or beheaded civilians or planted bombs along roadsides, in mosques or marketplaces. Yet every single atrocity of the war – on both sides – and every single death caused by the war, and every act of religious repression perpetrated by the extremist sects empowered by the war, is the direct result of the decision made by George W. Bush three years ago. Nothing he says can change this fact; nothing he does, or causes to be done, for good or ill, can wash the blood of these children – and the tens of thousands of other innocent civilians killed in the war – from his hands. *Note: "Ishaqi" now seems to be the preferred transliteration of the town''s name. In our earlier reports, we used "Isahaqi," one of several versions that came out in the early news reports.*UPDATE: The BBC reports this afternoon that the Iraqi government has officially rejected the Pentagon's investigation into the Ishaqi killings. Excerpt:
The Iraqi government has rejected the findings of a US military investigation into the deaths of 11 civilians in the village of Ishaqi, north of Baghdad.A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said the report, which cleared the US soldiers of wrongdoing, was unfair. The government will demand an apology and compensation, the spokesman said.
Visit Chris Floyds Website www.chris-floyd.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)