How comes you always mention the events of 9/11 but are reluctant at the same time to liften the dark shadow which still covers the true circumstances of this tragedy.

We understand that certain evidences and witnesses could lead your cover called state security into shaky grounds.

Start to realise that time has changed. You have never been entitled by any majority to act as the dictator of civilized people.

Have you ever been free of guilt (as a religious man) to throw the first rock? You got it, I was just referring to 9/11 and not the 2nd iraq war.

You could have avoided both and misused both of these sick attempts exlusively for your own and your friends commercial purpose and not for the one of all the Americans. We better don't even think of the Iraqis.

Step down, before they will dig you out of a hole like Saddam, if this story was not created in exactly the same way as all your sick media setups.

marcosolo, December 19th, 2003

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uploaded 19 Dec 2003

No More Mr. Nice Guy by Kurt Nimmo

When Robert Dreyfuss of the American Prospect asked an unspecified Bush neocon "strategist" how best to deal with the resistance in Iraq, the response he received was chilling, "It's time for 'no more Mr. Nice Guy.' All those people shouting, 'Down with America!' and dancing in the street when Americans are attacked? We have to kill them."

It's not only Iraqis dancing in the streets and elusive resistance fighters that deserve to be killed, but pro-Saddam demonstrators as well.

"While Washington and London were still congratulating themselves on the capture of Saddam Hussein," writes Robert Fisk in Baghdad, "US troops have shot dead at least 18 Iraqis in the streets of three major cities in the country. Dramatic videotape from the city of Ramadi 75 miles west of Baghdad showed unarmed supporters of Saddam Hussein being gunned down in semi-darkness as they fled from Americans troops. Eleven of the 18 dead were killed by the Americans in Samarra to the north of Baghdad."

The United States doesn't even pretend to respect the Geneva Conventions these days. Obviously, shooting unarmed demonstrators in the back as they flee is a war crime. But then neocons don't do international law.

As Bush has repeatedly made clear, he believes international treaties are for wimps, appeasers, and the irrelevant. International law is for pantywaists such as the French, not intractable and self-righteous Americans engaged in a forever war against "terr'ism," otherwise known as the Islamic religion.

Of course, it's not a war crime if the media reports the murder of unarmed civilians as fair and square combat against "armed demonstrators," as the Boston Globe did. Naturally, the Globe didn't bother to mention the video Robert Fisk witnessed, but then they are receiving their information straight from the Pentagon, not unembedded journalists on the street.

It wasn't the Boston Globe or other members of the Bush Ministry of Disinformation that reported Hussein al-Jaburi's death threat to the people of Tikrit. It was al-Jazeera, the Arab news agency twice bombed by the Pentagon for the heresy of telling the truth.

"Any demonstration against the government or coalition forces will be fired upon," said Jaburi, the US-imposed regional governor. "This is a fair warning."

So much for democracy -- but then the sort of democracy the Bushite neocons have in mind does not include the right to demonstrate.

The Bush version of democracy includes "privatization" of the Iraqi oil industry and other covetable natural resources by foreign transnational corporations, but not the right for Iraqi citizens to complain about it. Grousers and people in possession of Saddam's portrait will be shot.

No more Mr. Nice Guy.

According to Robin Pomeroy of Reuters, demonstrations are illegal in the province surrounding Tikrit. Demonstrators will be sentenced to a year or more in jail. "They are not allowed to go around kissing pictures of Saddam in this city," Lieutenant Colonel Steven Russell told Pomeroy. "It will not happen... We cannot hand out lollipops, it does not work."

Last week Iraq's Health Ministry ordered an abrupt end to the count of civilians killed during the invasion and occupation, according to the Associated Press. "We have stopped the collection of this information because our minister didn't agree with it," said Dr. Nazar Shabandar, the Health Ministry's director of planning. "The CPA doesn't want this to be done."

In other words, there will be no official confirmation of the number of civilians killed by the US, such as those mowed down recently in Ramadi, apparently for nothing more than expressing their support for Saddam Hussein, although the Pentagon would have us believe they were engaged in murder and mayhem or releasing pigeons to signal to comrades.

Is it possible the CPA and the Pentagon don't want you to know the exact number of people killed in Iraq because those numbers are about to escalate dramatically?

As Robert Fisk notes in his report about the Ramadi mass murder video, masked gunmen have appeared in Baghdad and at road checkpoints outside of Samarra. "They wear militia uniforms and, although they say they are part of the new American-backed 'Iraqi Civil Defense Corps', they have neither badges of rank nor unit markings," writes Fisk.

It's no secret the CIA has assassinated numerous Iraqis since Bush set his sights on their country. Recently leaked plans to kill even more, possibly many more, in much the same way the CIA killed 40,000 Vietnamese under the Phoenix program. As Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported on 29 March, CIA covert teams are "one feature of the largely invisible war being waged in Iraq by the CIA's and Pentagon's growing covert paramilitary and special operations divisions."

If we are to believe Seymour Hersh over at the New Yorker, the US has summoned the Israelis to help murder Iraqis who resist occupation. "The Israelis have been training us in some of their tactics," Hersh told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

"By now, we have put together enough sophisticated former Iraqi intelligence [Mukhabbarat] officers, we think, to form ad hoc advisory groups that would travel with our special forces," Hersh explained. "They'll also have an Israeli adviser, I think, pretty much undercover in the country advising them, too. So, that's the next step, you know. Bang, bang, bang."

And yet decades of bangs in the West Bank and Gaza have not put an end to Palestinian resistance to Zionist occupation and brutality. The Palestinians have actively resisted Zionist hyper-colonialism for well over thirty years. There's a good chance they will continue to do so for another thirty years.

The CIA, with Israeli help, will kill more than people directly involved in the resistance. "Compare America's conquest of Iraq with Israeli's conquest of Palestine, and you begin to understand," explains author and researcher Douglas Valentine. "In each case the strategy is massive war crimes on the one hand, and targeted kills of inspirational leaders on the other."

In other words, the CIA hit teams now roaming Iraq will assassinate intellectuals and "inspirational leaders," just as they did in Vietnam under the Phoenix program. "Under Phoenix," writes Valentine, "due process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered simply on the word of an anonymous informer." No doubt many Iraqis will face much the same.

It won't be the first time the CIA has targeted civilians in Iraq. In the 1963 military coup that eventually resulted in the US sanctioned dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the CIA provided lists of "communists" to be slaughtered. According to author Said Aburish (A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, 1997), 5,000 people were killed, including many doctors, lawyers, teachers, and professors who comprised Iraq's educated elite.

"No-one was spared. Even pregnant women and elderly men were killed. Some were tortured in front of their children," writes Mohamoud Shaikh in a review of Aburish's book. "According to the author, Saddam 'had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo [where he labored as a CIA asset] to join the victors... [he] was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centers for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.'"

Murder is second nature for Dubya, the son of a former CIA director who targeted over a million people (with the help of Clinton) for death through illegal bombing raids, starvation, and disease in the wake of the first Iraq invasion. As an appointed-president-in-waiting, Bush the Minor sharpened his murderous instincts in Texas by condemning nearly 150 people to death. Now he says he wants the same for Saddam.

"I think he ought to receive the ultimate penalty," Bush told ABC News, "for what he has done to his people... [he is] a disgusting tyrant who deserves justice, the ultimate justice."

Ultimate justice, for our Christian Zionist president who spends much of his time marooned in the Old Testament, is nothing short of the death penalty.

Indeed, Saddam was "a disgusting tyrant," one enabled by the United States and Europe. The US does not have an aversion to disgusting tyrants per se, so long as they do what they are told and remain obedient clients.

Maybe Bush should call for the execution of William Lakeland, the US assistant military attaché in Baghdad at the time of the coup that eventually brought Saddam to power. Lakeland was the main orchestrator and contact for the Ba'athist thugs the CIA now wants to hunt down and assassinate.

If Bush is truly disgusted by the rape rooms and mass graves of Saddam, he would have every person involved in the CIA-sponsored coup arrested, sent before a tribunal, convicted, and executed. At minimum, he should call George Tenet on the carpet and tell him no more Saddams, no more coups, no more mass assassination programs.

Of course, that will never happen. Only clients who run afoul of the Master Plan -- making damn sure every profitable corner of the earth is sucked dry by neoliberal exploitation -- will be hunted down, rounded up, rushed before a tribunal, and executed (or if lucky slammed into prison like another US client and CIA asset gone bad, Manual Noriega).

The Bushites over at the Pentagon have their work cut out for them. However, a spanking new Phoenix program aimed at Iraqi guerillas, intellectuals, or those who get in the way of what Halliburton and Bechtel want, will not put an end to the resistance, nor will US soldiers cutting down demonstrators "kissing pictures of Saddam" put an end to Iraqi outrage over the occupation and planned looting of their country.

If Bush gleans anything from the Israelis, it should be that brutality in the name of colonialism does not put an end to resistance, it only redoubles it. But then the Israelis do not understand this themselves, so how can we expect them to teach the Americans anything -- that is an anything except how to kill people in large numbers.

History books are filled with repeated examples of successful resistance to invasion and occupation -- from the Persian emperor Darius facing Scythian guerillas to Fulgencio Batista's overthrow by a threadbare group of revolutionaries in Cuba.

But then Bush doesn't bother to read books.

Source:  www.dissidentvoice.org  

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The onus is on the United States to accord this former ally and head of state all the rights due a high-level prisoner of war, as established at Nuremberg and The Hague.His testimony in open court could prove fascinating if he is allowed to detail his past relationships with top U.S. officials -- including the president's father and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who worked out terms of cooperation with Saddam in 1983.

And now that the "fear factor" of Saddam's ghostly presence has been removed, there is no longer any valid explanation for why former members of Saddam's regime and key scientists cannot show us where all those infamous weapons of mass destruction went. After all, this invasion -- based on a new doctrine of preemptive war that bypassed United Nations inspectors -- was not pitched to the American people as a mercy mission.

We were told that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the world and was close to building nuclear weapons that he might give to al-Qaida. Occupying Iraq, it was stated over and over again by the White House, was a legitimate response to the horror of Sept. 11 and a way to prevent, as Condoleezza Rice once put it, "a mushroom cloud" from appearing over an American city.

Of course, President Bush was finally forced to concede that there was no evidence that linked Saddam to 9/11. Yet, in his brief statement after the capture of Saddam, he again connected the secular dictator to the threat of fundamentalist terrorism. He did this while continuing silence on the Bush family's old business buddies in Saudi Arabia, backers of al-Qaida and other religious fanatics, who numbered Saddam among their enemies.

We have lost valuable time and resources in the struggle to quell al-Qaida and similar groups while creating a morass in Iraq. Saddam's removal was a politically motivated exploitation of our nation's anger and fear over the 9/11 attacks. With the historical footnote of his arrest now in the books, the White House needs to stop its daily lies of commission and omission regarding the war on terror. For example, the administration must stop its stonewalling of the panel Bush reluctantly formed to examine the origins of 9/11.

This official obstruction would seem to be a clear indication that Bush is worried about embarrassing details emerging that could threaten his re-election. Yet Congress and the public must know the truth about 9/11 so that we may make our judgments about what happened and about how similar tragedies can be prevented.

The capture of Saddam, while providing the president with fantastic propaganda footage, does nothing to make us safer from international terrorism. It could, however, shine a harsh light on Washington's decadelong military and economic support of the barbaric Saddam in his war against Iran's religious fanatics, who were making inroads with their brethren in Iraq.

For example, Bush has made frequent reference to Saddam's gassing of his own people, yet those incidents occurred when Bush's father and President Reagan were using the Sunni Baathists as a foil against Shiite Iran in a war that Saddam launched. Reagan removed the designation of Iraq as a terrorist nation and established diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime. The first President Bush extended $1.2 billion in credits to Saddam after the dictator used poison gas against Kurdish civilians.

This is a dirty history that calls into question our current motives in Iraq.

The threat of Saddam's return to power has been a key reason given by the United States for its hesitation to turn over any significant authority to Iraqis. Surely internationally supervised fair elections are now in order, and decisions about the rebuilding of Iraq and the disposition of its oil resources should be made by an Iraqi -- not an American -- government.

To linger in power over Iraq now is to suggest that our motives are imperial, rather than an affirmation of self-determination for the Iraqi people.

? Robert Scheer writes a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times.

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