Yeah right, like if I’m going to link to the real video. You can get your “war porn” elsewhere - it was bad when he killed people, and it is bad to derive some sense of happiness from watching him hang. So have some fun instead… it’s Christmas.
I’m glad he’s gone, but actually I would have him alive - yes alive. You know why? Because George Bush the elder, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney (through Halliburton) were waist-deep in shady businesses with him. What do prosecutors do when they get a big fish? Have them squeal the other big fishes. I’m sure Saddam was willing to offer plenty of incriminating documents in order to save his neck…
More U.S. troops are expected to be deployed in Iraq in the New Year. Despite obvious rethinking, there is no decision on withdrawal of occupation forces.
The presence of troops may be raised just for their own protection. According to a Pentagon report, U.S. and Iraqi forces are facing close to 1,000 attacks a week now. U.S. forces comprise more than 90 percent of the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq.
According to the White House, 49 countries joined that coalition at the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. That number has shrunk to 32, after countries like Italy and Canada withdrew troops this year.
Britain is expected to withdraw its 7,500 troops next year, after pulling out 1,300 earlier this year.
Yeah, that’s the spirit. Lets send in MORE troops and everything will magically be solved! How about addressing some of the real problems?
Sunnis are concerned how far U.S. forces will take that tilt next year. “They (the U.S. military) lifted their checkpoints around Sadr City in Baghdad saying it was ordered by Maliki,” Mahmood said. “Yet, when it comes to our Sunni areas they increased killing of innocent civilians.”
Most of the victims of death squads are Sunnis, whose bodies are found on the streets of Baghdad every day. Many bodies show signs of torture, particularly holes drilled into them, and wounds and deformation caused by acid.
U.S. forces ignore such killings, and carry out their own, in moves to crush Sunni resistance. And they are looking for reinforcements to carry out this job. Since the middle of December, the Bush Administration has been discussing sending an additional 20,000-50,000 troops to Iraq in a “temporary” move. There are currently 141,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, with at least 5,000 U.S. “advisors”.
“Security firmly in place, Clinton Fein’s latest exhibition, Torture, scheduled to open at Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco on January 4, 2007, is a shocking and defiant exploration of America’s approach to torture under the Bush administration,” the press release states.
The exhibition consists of “a series of staged and digitally manipulated photographic images” which “recreate infamous torture scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, transforming diffuse, muted and low-resolution images into large-scale, vivid, powerful and frightening reproductions.”
Artist Fein was born in South Africa, and according , he is “closely identified with his controversial web site, Annoy.com and his notable Supreme Court victory against Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act in 1997, where Fein’s right to disseminate his art was upheld in a landmark victory for First Amendment rights.”
And just what types of pictures he plans on exhibiting? Here are two of them:
And then you wonder why I think George W. Bush is a war criminal.
When most children in industrialized countries get Sony PSPs, movies and other videos games,
Ahmed Ghazi has little reason to stock Christmas toys at his shop in Fallujah. He knows what children want these days.
“It is best for us to import toys such as guns and tanks because they are most saleable in Iraq to little boys,” Ghazi told IPS. “Children try to imitate what they see out of their windows.”
And there are particular imports for girls, too, he said. “Girls prefer crying dolls to others that dance or play music and songs.”
As children in the United States and around the world celebrate Christmas, and prepare to celebrate the New Year, children in Iraq occupy a quite different world, with toys to match.
Much has been written about the physical health of Iraq’s population. But what about their mental health, especially of Iraqi children?
The difficulties of children have become particularly noticeable this year. “The only things they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the U.S. occupation,” Maruan Abdullah, spokesman for the Association of Psychologists of Iraq told reporters at the launch of a study in February this year.
The report warned that “children in Iraq are seriously suffering psychologically with all the insecurity, especially with the fear of kidnapping and explosions.”
The API surveyed more than 1,000 children throughout Iraq over a four-month period and found that “92 percent of the children examined were found to have learning impediments, largely attributable to the current climate of fear and insecurity.”
With nearly half of Iraq’s population under 18 years of age, the devastating impact of the violent and chaotic occupation is that much greater. Three wars since 1980, a refugee crisis of staggering proportions, loss of family members, suicide attacks, car bombs and the constant threat of home raids by occupation soldiers or death squads have meant that young Iraqis are shattered physically and mentally.
As early as April 2003, the United Nations Children’s Fund had estimated that half a million Iraqi children had been traumatized by the U.S.-led invasion. The situation has degenerated drastically since then.
A report issued by Iraq’s Ministry of Education earlier this year found that 64 children had been killed and 57 wounded in 417 attacks on schools within just a four-month period. In all 47 children were kidnapped on their way to or from school over the period.
But at least, Iraqi children must think highly of the United States, right? Wrong.
Teachers and social workers say children have begun to nurse a strong hatred of the United States. No more is the United States the image of a good life.
“Children have lost hope in the United States and the Iraqi government after the situation has only worsened every day,” Abdul Wahid Nathum, researcher for an Iraqi NGO which assists children told IPS in Baghdad (he did not want the organisation to be named).
“Their understanding of the ongoing events is incredible,” he said. “It is probably because the elder members of the family keep talking politics and watching news. Talking to a 12-year-old child, one would be surprised by the huge amount of news inside his head, which is not right.”
As a future pediatrician, these developments deeply disturb me. This type of trauma takes years and years to heal, and time is something Iraqis don’t seem to have on their side. And this is in addition to the critical refugee crisis that is taking place in Iraq, which I have talked about :
Children do not go out much to play, and they are not sure of home any more. The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every month. The number of Iraqis living in other Arab countries is now more than 1.8 million. There are in addition more than 1.6 million internally displaced people within Iraq.
The group Refugees International says that the increasing number of people fleeing Iraq means that this refugee crisis might soon overtake that in Darfur. And children suffer most from leaving, and they suffer most where they go.
Update #1: Welcome Crooks & Liars readers! This blog features mainly health & human rights news… so if you like what you see and like to keep up with the latest human rights news - the ones the mainstream media won’t cover - please consider bookmarking my blog, or adding my feed. I’m a new blogger, so the support is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Make that best articles as well. From the current Esquire Magazine, :
I could be perfectly fine without kids. If my wife wants kids, that’s fine, too. It’s not an issue because of this. But I plan on wearing my prosthetics most all the time. And if I have those on, I’m not going to be able to carry my kids. I can’t really bend over because it’ll throw my balance off. So I’m not going to be able to pick up my kids. So you’re walking through the park and they don’t want to walk, they want to be carried. Sorry, I can’t do it. I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s going to be hard.
He just lost 3 limbs, but is still upbeat about life, about accomplishing more in life - his life did not stop. He must be courageous to pose in the cover of a magazine like that - not because of his amputee status, but because the .
If this magazine cover does not stop you in your tracks, nothing will.
—–
Update #2:
Due to popular requests, here are the most popular posts in my blog:
These news pieces come by courtesy of the IPS News Service, an awesome, but overlooked in the U.S., news agency.
Take this article by IPS, titled :
“I wish I could flee to any third world country and work in garbage collection rather than stay here and live like a frightened rat,” Adel Mohammed Aziz, a teacher from Baghdad told IPS. “We are all living in fear for our lives; death chases us all around..”
Live in a third world country and work in the garbage, than live in Iraq. How does that square with President’s Bush rosy “we are winning in Iraq” babble talk?
Also, forget about children in Iraq enjoying any of the fruits of the “democracy” Bush has brought there. Not only is Iraq lagging in all health indicators, :
Statistics released by the ministry in October showed that a mere 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to roughly 75 percent of students who were attending classes the previous year, according to the Britain-based NGO Save the Children.
Just before the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003, school attendance was nearly 100 percent.
Iraqis are forgetting almost what a child needs. Dr. Ahmed Aaraji of the Baghdad Societal Organisation, an Iraqi NGO which monitors the state of Iraqi schools and families in an effort to assist families where possible, is trying to remind everyone what that should be.
[…]Iraq was awarded The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) prize for eradicating illiteracy in 1982. At that time, literacy rates for women were among the highest of all Islamic nations.
(All emphasis is mine)
Not only that, but - yes, even eclipsing the situation in some African nations.
The displacement of Iraqis from Iraq is currently the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis, according to the Washington-based group Refugees International which works towards providing humanitarian assistance and protection for displaced people.
The United Nations estimates that at least 2.3 million Iraqis have fled the growing violence in their country. They estimate that 1.8 million Iraqis have fled to surrounding countries, while another half million have vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq. An estimated 40,000 people are leaving Iraq every month for Syria alone, according to the UN.
And that is not counting the 600,000 innocent Iraqis that have died in the Iraq War (), so yes, we can conclude that it is pretty fucking bad for Iraqis.
At least, ever-growing faithful readers, you can rest assured that our Decider-in-Chief . The president of the U.S. started a war on false pretenses that thus far has resulted in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilinas, lost all of our allies, bled the treasury dry, and he’s resting well.
This is not exactly news to anyone who has actually followed the Iraq war, but let me tell you, if the full details of each atrocity were covered by the U.S. media, U.S. support for the war would fall fast.
A piece :
The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) recently issued a frightening report documenting the growing practice of public executions of women by Shia Militia. One of the report’s more grisly accounts was a story of a young woman dragged by a wire wound around her neck to a close-by football field and then hung to the goal post. They pierced her body with bullets. Her brother came running trying to defend his sister. He was also shot and killed. Sunni extremists are no better: OWFI members estimate that no less than 30 women are executed monthly for honor related reasons.
I cannot think of one single, fucking reason as to why a woman has to be tortured this way. There is NO reason at all.
I wonder what changed in Iraq - besides the U.S. making a clusterfuck out of that nation I mean. From the same article:
Before the U.S. invasion, Iraqi women had high levels of education. Their strong and independent women’s movement had successfully forced Saddam’s government to pass the groundbreaking 1959 Family Law Act which ensured equal rights in matters of personal law. Iraqi women could inherit land and property; they had equal rights to divorce and custody of their children; they were protected from domestic violence within the marriage. In other words, they had achieved real gains in the struggle for equality between women and men. Iraqi women, like all Iraqis, certainly suffered from the political repression and lack of freedom, but the secular — albeit brutal — Baathist regime protected women from the religious extremism that denies freedom to a majority of women in the Arab world.
The invasion of Iraq, however, changed the status of Iraqi women for the worse. Iraq’s new colonial power, the United States, elevated a new group of leaders, most of who were allied with ultra conservative Shia clerics. Among the Sunni minority, the quick disappearance of their once dominant political power led to a resurgence of religious identity. Consequently, the Kurds, celebrated for their history of resistance to the Iraqi dictator, were able to reclaim traditions like honor killings, putting thousands of women at risk.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Sadam is sentenced to hang, but there is no reason at all why the existing laws had to be gutted for some other extreme laws. Also, I’m not Iraqi, so I can’t vouch for the laws in question in Iraq, but the author of the article, , is a much more knowledgeable about these issues than George W. Bush, or for that matter, the entire Iraq Study Group.
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