Archive | Iraq

Fallujah, Fukushima, & the Global Radiation Catastrophe, Part 1

NOVANEWS
 

A camel lies dead at the side of a road near the Saudi capital of Riyadh

by Jim Fetzer, Leuren Moret and Christopher Busby

 

Over the past century, the American military has been transformed into the supreme global “military cop”, in large measure for the  financial benefit of the international banking cartel and transnational corporations. 

This transformation is manipulated daily by the international financiers, also known as the Zionist Anglo-American “permanent war crimes racketeering syndicate”, which secures mineral resources in weaker countries and pumps vast quantities of drugs into the global market.

Headquartered in Hong Kong, the UK and China are partners in a hidden global drug economy with 5 times more money circulating than in the economy we know.

The cost of these military adventures since World War II, accelerated by the introduction of nuclear weapons, has been very high and may even lead to the extinction of our species.

Two million US soldiers and veterans since 1990 are medically disabled, dying homeless in the streets of America, with little help from the US government. 

Poisoned with depleted uranium and the “smog of war”, soldiers are guaranteed a death sentence on the modern battlefield where a new form of nuclear Kabuki warfare has been secretly raging for more than twenty years. 

The global effect of the resulting nuclear pollution has been a drastic increase in birth defects, infant mortality, and death rates across continents, regions and mountain ranges.

German Salt Mine Storage – the Sloppy Days

A stunning global decline in fertility and birth rates, with an increase in death rates, will result in the economic decline and loss of cultural and physical viability in countries, where the replacement birth rate is falling and populations are shrinking.

Elevated levels of uranium in Los Angeles drinking water were reported, and correlated with individual battles in the Middle East and Afghanistan during 2006-07.

Iran has one of the highest declines of fertility in the world, from 8+ children per woman before Chernobyl in 1986, to less than two children per woman by 2002, and continuing to decline over the past decade.

The astounding increase in Iranian deaths in 2006-07, was 3.6 million, a seemingly inexplained 4.7% drop in population in a single year.  In the same time period many thousands of camels died throughout the Middle East and North Africa, 5,000 alone in Saudi Arabia and no known cause.

Such a catastrophic and acute phenomenon in both humans and animals indicates an environmental cause.  Forensic evidence is now emerging that Iran has been the target of a covert nuclear war since 1990, carried out by the US and the UK from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iran is not the real nuclear threat, which instead derives from  the US and Britain, who are partners in new forms of nuclear annihilation with the world’s population downwind.  Brace yourself for what you are about to learn.

“The Real Deal” Radio Show (February 3, 2012)

Host: Jim Fetzer: James Fetzer Ph.D.

Guests:
Dr. Busby: Christopher Busby, Ph.D.
Leuren Moret: Leuren Moret, B.S., M.A., PhD (ABD)

Editor’s Note: This transcription was prepared by William B. Fox, Publisher, America First Books, who also helped organize this interview.

Hour One

Dr. Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Real Deal” with a return engagement of two simply extraordinary guests I have had in the past. Leuren Moret, an independent geoscientist who has done expert studies on the Fukushima disaster and radiation problems around the world, including depleted uranium, and Dr. Christopher Busby, a visiting biomedical studies professor at the University of Ulster and the co-author of reports about the effects of depleted uranium — but it turns out to be enriched uranium — in Iraq, especially in Fallujah. Our interviews about this have been previously archived at Veterans Today, in particular under the heading of [hour one: "Catastrophic Effects of Radiation Contamination" and hour two:] “New Bombs and War Crimes in Fallujah” Leuren and Chris welcome to the show.

Dr. Christopher Busby: Yes, hello.

Leuren Moret: Thank you.

Dr. Fetzer: I am so pleased to have you both here today. I thought we would begin with Leuren giving us an update on what has been going on with Occupy Wall Street in Oakland and related issues, because it seems as though the government is using military-type tactics and weapons, some of which appear to be very sophisticated. Leuren, could you bring us up to date?

L. Moret: Well in October the Homeland Security, local law enforcement, the Oakland Police Department, which is the FBI COINTELPRO headquarters for northern California, and even troops from Bahrain in the Middle East practiced terrorism drills on the UC Berkeley campus. This was in October in anticipation of the Occupy movement. And so now we know they are including foreign troops in this too.

Dr. Fetzer: That is pretty bizarre, all by itself, Leuren, foreign troops in the United States. I think if the American people knew that, they would be outraged.

Fig. 1: ISRAEL’S ELITE SWAT TEAM WINS INTERNATIONAL URBAN SHIELD 2011 COMPETITIONFor the second consecutive year since Israel’s Police elite SWAT team, the “YaMaM,” has participated in the prestigious Urban Shield counter-terror competition in the USA, the YaMam has once again won first place.  Similar to last year’s impressive win, Israel’s accomplishment remains strangely, highly under-reported. The only mention of this impressive achievement is on the Facebook page for Israel’s police.  32 SWAT teams from the USA, the FBI and from other countries, participated in the non-stop 48 hour competition. The competition included counter-terror, dealing with serious crimes, hostage retrieval, and a variety of tactical and urban combat situations.   Source 

L. Moret: Well people are pretty outraged here. And so then the Occupy movement, pretty much in California, started on the UC Davis campus which is one of the most conservative of the UC campuses because it has an agriculture history. And now this is really interesting, the new chancellor of UC Davis — I have two degrees from UC Davis — is a Greek woman, and she was involved in the student riots and protests in Greece, I have forgotten when it happened, maybe the 60′s or 70′s. And she is extremely conservative and she refused to even talk to the students. They were just sitting on the sidewalks in silence and in a park, and she ordered the UC Davis police to go down and pepper spray those protestors, so there are these great video clips – taken from cell phones – of this officer just walking up and down this line of maybe 30 or 50 students sitting with their heads down and their hands on their laps, and he just sprayed them in the face and all over their bodies with pepper spray.

Fig. 2: OCCUPY MOVEMENT AT U.C. DAVIS CAMPUS   (Photo: REUTERS – Brian Nguyen) A University of California at Davis police officer pepper-sprays students during their sit-in at an “Occupy UCD” demonstration in Davis, California in this 18 November 2011 file photo.  Source 

And so the Occupy movement spread from there and we have had a lot of Occupy movement situations going on for the last couple of weeks in Oakland, California, which is across the San Francisco Bay from San Francisco.

Dr. Fetzer: Leuren, I have seen those videos of the campus police officer pepper-spraying those students, and it is completely stunning. They are totally passive.


YouTube

L. Moret: Yes.

Dr. Fetzer: I am sure it violates all of the guidelines for the use of pepper spray. It is not only blatantly unethical, abusive of the students, but I am sure it is in violation of the law.

L. Moret: There was not even any justification for it.

Dr. Fetzer: No justification whatsoever.

L. Moret: And so what has happened as a result, is that the police presence and police force keeps getting ramped up with each one of these Occupy situations in different cities and campuses. And just on the weekend, that would be the end of January 2012, in Oakland they arrested 400 people. And then the demonstrators were marching through Oakland. They were going to occupy an empty building and the police have just increased their pressure to shut it down. And along with this is that there has been an increase in communications disruption, telephones, Internet, computers, with an increase in electromagnetic frequency (EMF) weapons used at all levels against everyone in various parts of the U.S. on the Occupy movement. And this was all funded by George Soros.

The whole Occupy movement in the U.S. is a George Soros project. And it is a continuation of the colored and flowered revolutions that he funded in Central Asia, then Eastern Europe, then North Africa, then the Middle East, and so basically the United States is being overthrown right now in a silent revolution funded by George Soros who is an agent for the City of London bankers. The Rothschilds.

Dr. Fetzer: Well, elaborate on that Leuren. I mean, you know, Soros as an agent, what would the Rothschild banking system have to benefit from the Occupy movement?

L. Moret: Well, it is an overthrow of the U.S. government. The North American governments. They are even doing Occupy movements in Canada. So it is a transition. And it is a transition from civil society and more democratic governments to fascism.


YouTube

This has been underway for a long time. And Tun Dr. Mahathir [bin Mohamad], the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, who Dr. Busby has also joined with us at conferences, antiwar conferences, organized by Dr. Mahathir in Malaysia, he told me about George Soros and how George Soros had gone into Southeast Asian countries and looted their economies. And he said Indonesia was the most damaged. And he said they tried to loot Malaysia, which Dr. Mahathir built that whole economy over his 22 year period as Prime Minister of Malaysia. And he said he was able to fight very hard and to protect most of the money in the economy. He said they got some, but they didn’t get very much. And so these operatives, Warren Buffet is another one, they are all operating on behalf of the international financiers. And these Soros-funded revolutions all over Central Asia and Eastern Europe and North Africa and the Middle East and now North America are to destabilize governments and weaken them so that the bankers can steal more money.

Dr. Fetzer: Well Leuren, let me ask a couple of rather naive questions. It seems to me the United States has already become a fascist police state, that signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 which subverted four or five different articles of the Bill of Rights was like completing a grand slam against the Constitution that was initiated by the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act under George W. Bush. It seemed to me therefore that not only has Barack Obama and most of the politicians, the Senators and Congressmen who have been supporting all of this violated their oath, the same oath I took as a Marine Corps officer to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic, but that the Occupy movement has been there to protest the growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth between the one percent and the 99% and also to oppose these endless wars of aggression against nations that never attacked us, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and of course the threatened attack on Iran, which has no justification whatsoever. So it has seemed to me that the Occupy movement has been a positive sign of young people in this country becoming politically aware and taking active measures to oppose the fascist police state that is already here. So I am puzzled, you know, that your take seems to be that the Occupy movement is a tool of fascism when it seems to me that the Occupy movement has been a form of resistance to fascism.

L. Moret: Well it appears to be a form of resistance. That is one aspect of it. And certainly not all people participating are bad. But, I would like you to answer a question. Why did George Soros privately fund the Occupy movement through a private organization, an NGO, that is almost exclusively lawyers?

Dr. Fetzer: Leuren, I have no idea. Actually, personally, I don’t know that to be the case, but assuming –

L. Moret: It is the case. It is the case.

Dr. Fetzer: But assuming it is the case, I just don’t have an answer for that.

L. Moret: This is not a grass roots movement. This is a Soros-funded takeover or introduction of the police state.

But I don’t want to really talk about this anymore because Dr. Busby is on the line and maybe we should move on to –

Dr. Fetzer: No, I am just curious the difference in our general takes on this because I thought the Occupy Movement was a positive –

L. Moret: I don’t really know that much about it. I know who funded it. I know it is a private organization. And it is made up of lawyers, and I know this is not originally a grass roots movement.

Dr. Fetzer: Yes, yes, yes. Well Chris, I don’t know if you feel comfortable adding your own perspective to this, but if you do, I would be glad to have it.

Dr. Busby: Well I think the real question here is who are the “bad guys”? In the last five years I have had every single group of people named to me by different conspiracy theorists as being the bad guys. From the Zionists to the lizards, from outer space to the Rothschilds, who very commonly pop up with all sorts of Jewish bankers. I mean there is an entire sort of spectrum of conspiracy theories out there, and I kind of put them all on the shelf of my mind, you know, as possible.

But my main belief is that rather than moaning about what is happening, I think the time has come to try and do something about it. And what I think is required here is some sort of new ideology. And I am working with some colleagues to try and create such a thing. Because what it seems to me is that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the last major world ideology if you like, we now live in a sort of a monstrous chaos situation which is just controlled by a lot of different people who are all scrabbling for power in a system which is dominated by money and by a sort of monster created by an economic system. And in a sense, to my mind, you don’t really have to have “bad guys”. The system itself is the “bad guy”. It is going to create the economics. Once you set up this sort of economic system and allow it to run, it almost automatically produces a monster. And this monster is a “short term gains” monster. So you have a whole load of organizations, if you like, all connected to each other by instant communication systems, which are constantly aimed at making more money instantly on the basis of any change in their environment, and that to me is sufficient to explain nearly everything that is going on.

Now in the late 1960′s, obviously I am a hippie, I come from a long — I suspect Leuren was one too, you know…

Dr. Fetzer: [Laughter]

Dr. Busby: Well, I am sure she was, really.

Dr. Fetzer: [More laughter]

L. Moret: I really was not a hippie, believe it or not.

Dr. Busby: Weren’t you?

Dr. Fetzer: Should have been. Should have been!

Dr. Busby: Call it a hippie or call it what you like, but there was an enormous movement after the Second World War to try and make the world into a nice place, you know. A nice, loving place where there was sort of an equitable and just system for people to live happily. And there were a lot of very clever people, French intellectuals and philosophers and all sorts of psychologists and sociologists who were all trying to deconstruct the causes of the various world wars that there were. And by and large they succeeded, I think. Then we had this ideology that everybody could live happily and so forth, and there were revolutions, rather like the one you are talking about now, I guess. You know there were more revolutions. We had them in Germany, and Europe and in England. I was involved in the English one. But the problem is that they actually succeeded in a way.

But when they got to the point where they succeeded, nobody knew what to put in the place of the system that they had overthrown, intellectually and in terms of the general feeling of people, it seems to me. And what happened then was Reagan and Thatcher and all the bastards all kind of struck back, and the hippie movement was brought down by drugs and so forth. And since then nothing really has been there to replace it in terms of an ideology.

I think that is what is badly needed, an ideology, and I don’t think it is this group or that group or the other group, although I am sure they are all struggling for power. And they are all “bad guys”, but I don’t see it in quite the same terms as Leuren. I am sure Soros funds all sorts of people. But I am sure all sorts of people fund all sorts of people, in the hope that they might be able to gain something out of it. It doesn’t mean to say that they are the only “bad guys” around. That is my take on all of this sort of thing, anyway, and I think it is time we started to develop a new ideology.

Dr. Fetzer: I think that is very interesting. I myself have been among the Republican candidates for office stunned by Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum who have been calling for a first strike on Iran as though they were completely abysmally ignorant of world history.

Fig. 3:  WHO IS THE REAL NUCLEAR THREAT? Iran is surrounded by 45 U.S. military bases, fully armed with nuclear weapons, used on Middle Eastern battlefields since 1990.  Source

Iran hasn’t attacked another country for over 300 years. Iran has signed the Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran has allowed inspectors into its country. There is no actual evidence that Iran is attempting to produce atomic weapons, indeed the Ayatollah has forbidden Iran from developing those weapons. Not only that, but if Iran had such a weapon it could not use it offensively without running the risk of nuclear annihilation. In fact a representative for the American Enterprise Institute has acknowledged that it really isn’t a question of whether Iran does or does not have nuclear weapons, but rather of Iran’s influence over the Middle East.

More recently we have reports of the actual issue that concerns the peaceful use of atomic energy – that Iran is planning to develop the nuclear energy rods that are needed to run the reactors, and that they have the potential to undercut the American nuclear energy industry and thereby cut into their profits, perhaps even put them out of business. And that that is really what is going on. But it actually is all a charade.

That the nuclear weapon issue is simply a complete smoke screen, and if anyone cared about nuclear weapons in the Middle East they ought to be concerned about Israel, which has 200 to 600 of these little beauties. It has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Won’t allow inspectors into its country. Where if Israel or the United States were to attack Iran, estimates have it that there would be a million deaths of Iranians outright, and that as the contamination clouds spread over Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, there would be a minimum of 35 million more additional premature deaths.  And indeed by some estimates, and I think the two of you are very well positioned to comment on this, by the estimates since there are some 80 of these different sites developing nuclear energy in Iran, that the results, the contamination should be so catastrophic, including Strontium 90, that it has the potential to spread worldwide and risk the extinction of the human species.

Dr. Chris Busby: Well I think we are well on the way to that already, to be honest, without having to attack Iran. I mean at the moment we have the dissemination of radionuclides from Fukushima and from Chernobyl and from the weapons used in the Middle East, and the evidence is that this is already having an effect on human fertility and obviously therefore also the fertility of living systems. So I am not sanguine about the future of the human race even now. But of course if they attack Iran, and I am sure that they would be using nuclear weapons to do so, and so it won’t be just whatever it is they bomb in Iran, it will be the releases from the nuclear weapons themselves. And those of course will go all over the globe.

We know from the weapons fallout in the 1960′s what effect that has, and that has been the cause of the current cancer epidemic. And so, well, what can I say. I mean these are resource wars fundamentally. I mean all of these invasions of the Middle East by the United States and allies, but mainly the United States –

L. Moret: And England!

Dr. Busby: — Well, yes of course and England, but [these invasions] have been to control the resources of the Middle East. I think that is mainly what is — and of course not only the resources of the Middle East, but the distribution of the resources of the Middle East using different types of money. Because one of the main problems going back to Saddam Hussein and then later on to Gaddafi was the decision by those people, to move their financial systems into the Euro, and in the case of Gaddafi into gold, to create the Arab dinar. And so of course that would have undercut the dollar as a world trade currency, and the dollar as a world trade currency is the only way that the United States can survive. Because as long as that trade system exists, the dollars can just be created. They can just print them. But of course, you know, if they sell you the oil in the United States and they say, “Oh look, sorry mate but we want to have gold dinars,” or “We want to have Euros for this, then you are in trouble because you don’t have them.”

L. Moret: I would like to make a comment too.

Dr. Fetzer: Yes.

L. Moret: Did you want to say something Jim?

Dr. Fetzer: Yes, I just wanted to say that I wanted to stay for the moment in the Middle East, however, and then, during the next segment we will turn to Japan. But please do add what you would like to say.

L. Moret: Well during all the military adventures of the British Empire in the 1700′s and 1800′s they were, as everyone knows, all over the world and involved in India and China and so forth and so on. And all that militarism nearly bankrupted the British government. What has happened now in the 20th and 21st centuries is that the baton for militarism has been passed on from the British to the U.S.

We are the military cop and the military bully for England now, the British Empire.  And in Iraq and Afghanistan and also Yugoslavia, the United States sent many, many, many soldiers and funded all these military ventures. We have two million medically disabled American soldiers. I live in Berkeley California. They are living in the streets. They are dying next to the sidewalk behind bushes. They are dying in the parks. The VA has done almost nothing for them.

And recently it came out that the government of China has now made an agreement or contracts or whatever to secure much of the oil reserves in Iraq. So could you please tell me how the U.S. benefited from invading Afghanistan to protect the British and their opium crops and to secure the oil for China which the London bankers are pumping now, and dumping the western economies, and I would just like to know what we got besides all the bills for all that militarism.

And the wars are not over. The Navy is developing much more horrific electromagnetic rail guns to plunder more countries of their resources, mostly for the British and for corporations, international corporations. And I just think that we have to look at who is behind this global agenda. It is not just a few “bad guys”. It is financiers and corporations. And why are so many of our pension funds, university pension funds and investment portfolios, retirement pension funds – this is not just in the U.S., it is Canada too – and government pension funds are invested in the U.S. war machine.

Two hundred and fifty American war corporations are much of the investment, much of the funds, retired government pension funds for Canadian government and the national government and for the different regions and provinces are invested in American war corporations. So until you follow the money you don’t know what you are talking about. And I am not talking about the two of you.

Dr. Fetzer: [Laughter]

L. Moret: I mean me too. But until I started investigating nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapons program I had no idea about anything, any agenda, any “bad guys”, any politics, I could not care less. All I wanted to do was go on field trips all over the world.

And when I started following the trail of the nuclear weapons it took ten years, Jim. And it took me to London and Wall Street. It is the international financiers that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) exist for. And they have been created so that they can loot the world of natural resources.

Dr. Fetzer: Leuren those are all excellent points. We have to take our first break. This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Real Deal” with my special guests today Leuren Moret and Dr. Christopher Busby. We will be right back.

[FIRST BREAK]

Dr. Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer your host on “The Real Deal” continuing my conversation with Leuren Moret, an independent geoscientist, who has done especially expert studies on Fukushima, and Dr. Christopher Busby, a visiting Biomedical Studies Professor at the University of Ulster, who has done brilliant research on the effects of enriched uranium, it turns out in Iraq, especially in Fallujah.

Leuren I think you were making some simply excellent points. I would just like to add that it also stuns me that these candidates for the Republican nomination are also abysmally ignorant of the history of international law, where treaties into which the United States has entered in relation to the Constitution, have the same status under the law as the Constitution itself, and these extend as far back as the Hague Convention of 1899, the Kellogg-Briand Peace Treaty of 1928, and even the United Nations Charter which obligate member nations to negotiate with other nations and not to resort to military force, with the only exception is when they confront an imminent threat. There is no imminent threat posed by Iran, just as there was no imminent threat posed by Iraq or Afghanistan, much less Libya where NATO was the intermediary, all of which has disgusted me in the extreme.

But for these people to offer themselves as candidates to become President of the United States, when they don’t know history and they don’t know international law is simply appalling. I mean they are actually talking about first strikes that would be in violation of the Constitution for which they are hoping to assume an office that would commit them to an oath to preserve, protect, and defend. To me it is all about as absurd a form of political theater as one could imagine.

L. Moret: Well just look at Newt Gingrich. He can’t even be faithful to his wives. Not just one wife. [Laughter]. So if people take an oath of office, and they can’t even keep their own family dynamics straight, then how in the world could you ever trust them? I mean that is just politicians. But, another thing that I wanted to comment about is, oh gosh, now I forgot, wait a minute.

Dr. Fetzer: It will come back. It will come back. Chris, let me ask you this. I think we have, of course based upon your research, a dramatic reduction in normal births in Iraq. As I recall the statistics are like a fourth of Iraqi pregnancies end in still births, and of the live births, three quarters are suffering from severe genetic defects. And of course those genetic defects are going to remain in the genome of the Iraqi people indefinitely. I mean you know how are we ever going to overcome this problem?

Dr. Busby: Well it is not indefinitely. I mean what happens is that once the signal has run out of the genome, which it does following any person who does not have any child before they die, I mean that is basically how it works, then I suppose it will kind of recover. But it will be quite a long time. I mean from what we see from the studies that have been done after Chernobyl on mice and voles, there will be at least twenty two generations where these signals have maintained themselves. So it does seem as if there is going to be quite a lot of genetic damage manifested in those populations for quite a long time. And of course that is some kind of war crime.

L. Moret: It is irreversible.

Dr. Fetzer: Chris has explained that it may be something from which recovery is possible after a vast number, in this case of mice, twenty two generations, Leuren, so–

L. Moret: Well, Muller did early, early genetic studies before 1920 on Drosophila melanogaster which is the fruit fly. He exposed males to X-rays and then studied them — because they have such a short reproductive cycle, and you can get so many generations over a very short period of time.  Even before 1920 he had proved that these mutations caused by ionizing radiation are permanent, in the genome, and they never reverse themselves. He won the Nobel Prize in 1946 for that work. It is irreversible. It is permanent, and there is no way it is going to mend itself.

Fig. 4: INCREASE OF BIRTH DEFECTS IN BELARUS (1988-1996)

Early studies during bomb testing indicated that for each visible birth defect in fetuses exposed to ionizing radiation, ten internal defects occurred.  When sperm or ovum carry mutations, the mutations are expressed in every cell of the new organism, and passed on to all future generations as permanent genetic damage. (Atomic Radiation and Life Rev.Edit. by P. Alexander (1965) Penguin Books. Source: Information bulletin of the population health in 18 contaminated territories and medical help to liquidators of the Chernobyl consequences in 1985-1996, Department of Health and Medical Industry of the Tula Region, Tula, 1997 (in Russian).      

Dr. Fetzer: Well Chris, are you alluding to that portion of the population that may not have been so exposed, or do you believe actually, even in regard to the –

Dr. Busby: I think that everybody was exposed. But from what we know about genomic instability, and I am not talking about the genetic effects that Muller was studying, what we now know is that there is a random signal which is associated with what is called “genomic instability”. And this signal controls sort of random mutation in the descendants, in any individual that carries this signal. But actually not all individuals are set up to do this. So there does seem to be a proportion of any population which appears to be immune from this process and that the cells which are or would be affected by this process actually just die. So there seems to have been some kind of fork in evolution which has resulted in two types of individuals and two types of cells, too. The cell that, when it receives damage, just commits suicide, and then the other sort of cell which, when it receives damage, switches on this genomic instability signal. So that is kind of what I am talking about. So there probably will be a proportion of this population who will have been exposed, but will not manifest this signal in the same way as the others, or even at all.

Dr. Fetzer: If you are talking about 22 generations, and if we measured a generation in terms of, say, an early reproductive cycle, roughly 20 years, you are talking about 440 years.

Dr. Busby: Of course, yes, sure. I mean you know it is a very long time. So it is nothing that we should rejoice about. But I am just saying that seems to be the evidence at this moment.

Dr. Fetzer: The prospect that the human species is going to have extinguished itself long before there is genetic recovery in Iraq seems to me to be overwhelming.

Dr. Busby: I tell you I have just finished off a book about Fukushima, and in this book which is in Japanese actually – I was writing with a Japanese woman, what we considered was the population of Belarus. Now if you look at the population of Belarus, after the Chernobyl accident there was an instant drop in the birth rate. It went down and down and down and down. And at the same time, at exactly the same point, the death rate went up and up and up and up and up.

Fig. 5:  CHERNOBYL BIRTH RATES AND DEATH RATES (1985-95)

Belarus birth rate and death rate in the Tula region (1985-1995): all districts, 18 contaminated areas and 7 clean districts. Source: Information bulletin of the population health in 18 contaminated territories and medical help to liquidators of the Chernobyl consequences in 1985-1996, Department of Health and Medical Industry of the Tula Region, Tula, 1997 (in Russian).

And about five years after the Chernobyl accident these two crossed each other, and so if you divide the death rate by the birth rate, or the birth rate by death rate, you get sort of a demographic index which you can also plot. And what this shows is a loss of a number of people enabling replacement of the population. And when you get below a certain level, you just do not get population replacement. And that is what we see in Belarus and we see it in a lot of other countries affected by the Soviet Union. And we will certainly see it in Japan. And I think generally the way things are going, with the contamination of the biosphere by radionuclides from all sorts of sources, we are going to see this generally on the planet. And this is extraordinarily worrying.

Dr. Fetzer: Chris, just for clarification, now as the replacement rate drops, you have a shrinking population. Now in relation to that shrinking population is it still the case that the replacement rate is going to lead to increasing shrinkage?

Dr. Busby: Well it certainly seems to be the case in Belarus when you look at it so far. And of course, you know, it is obvious just from mathematics that the fewer people you have to breed, the fewer children there will be, and therefore the fewer children there will be to breed and so on. I mean this is what we see in the Newfoundland cod, you know. If you reduce the population to a certain point, it cannot recover.

Dr. Fetzer: And we are talking about large scale human populations.

Dr. Busby: We certainly are. In Belarus, we are talking about an entire country. And I have seen similar effects when you look at the demographic index of the Baltic states where a lot of radioactivity came. I mean I haven’t studied it extensively, but theoretically it is quite predictable that this effect is happening all over the globe.

Of course the people who want to make loads of money would like to see this because there has been an enormous Malthusian expansion in population and people have been endlessly moaning about the fact that there are limits to the amount of food that can be produced and the amount of energy that is necessary to keep these people sustained and so on.

Dr. Fetzer: The carrying capacity.

Dr. Busby. So you could argue that if there were “bad guys” up there at the top, you know, and they had some kind of plan, then that plan might well include the extinction of a large proportion of the human race using some sort of chemical weapons.

And of course that is another conspiracy theory that we read all over the place on the Internet.

Dr. Fetzer: But Chris, it seems as though this phenomenon is clearly going to take place in the Middle East.

Dr. Busby: Yes, I think so.

Dr. Fetzer: And of course in Japan, where I want to invite Leuren’s comments, but she had previously observed, and I believe you two had confirmed, that in Israel itself that the replacement rate is not being fulfilled, and therefore that Israel is also destined for extinction.

Dr. Busby: That is right. Yes. That was pointed out following a study that was done in Jerusalem of sperm counts. But you have to consider, I mean the state of Israel to some extent, they would be very concerned about the Arab population because of just human behavior. Because the Arabs breed at a faster rate than the Israelis, so ultimately they would breed their way to democratic success. So any mechanism that would kill them off would be something that somebody might embrace, you know, if they were a “bad guy”, and they wanted to…

Dr. Fetzer: We are talking about “K selection and r selection.”

Dr. Busby: Yes, sure, sure, sure. Anyway, you know, all of this is very sad, but all of it is very real as well. And I think that we need to — well, I don’t know what we need to do — but we need certainly to communicate with the powerful and the rich, and the people who might well be in charge of trying to change the world in the way that Leuren is talking, to communicate with them that they actually are not going to survive either.

Dr. Fetzer: Yes.

Dr. Busby: That there is no way that they can cut themselves off from these effects.

Dr. Fetzer: Yes. I think that is part of their stupidity. They are simply so ignorant of ecology and evolution Chris that they do not understand that the consequences they are inducing on the subpopulations are going to affect the entire population eventually.

Dr. Busby: That’s right.

L. Moret: I would just like to make a comment about for instance the Rothschilds who are the London bankers, and they certainly have a global grip on economics, but since the 1700′s, since Mayer Amschel Rothschild ordered his children to marry their first cousins in order to keep the money in the family, why is anyone presuming these are sane people? They are not. They have inbred in their own family for many, many generations – 250 years, 260 years. So we are talking about people who — they don’t have mental faculties like we do. They are different. They are not like us.

Dr. Fetzer: But Leuren, I might grant all of that. It is also true of the Mitt Romneys and the Rick Santorums. Rick Santorum is such a lunatic he doesn’t even believe in contraception, so here is a man who is one at the same time avowedly pro-life.  He won’t even allow abortion or permit it in the case of rape or incest, although apparently in his own family his wife confronted a birth that was going to cost her life, and they decided to go ahead with an abortion.  But he wants to curtail the use of contraceptives, sex education, birth control, which of course is going to bring more unwanted children into the world, and therefore increase the rate of abortion. I mean these people, their views are completely incoherent.

L. Moret: He is not going to get elected. Obama is going to get selected.

Dr. Fetzer: Well the point I am making Leuren, is even some of our prominent political figures, these are two of the four remaining candidates for President of the United States on the Republican side, are insane. That they have views that are not rational. That they are completely detached from reality. Some like Santorum’s in particular are incoherent. He does not have a consistent set of beliefs.

L. Moret: Well do you know what Fidel Castro said last week? He said, “These are the craziest candidates, this is the most disgusting street theater I have ever seen. It is not an election, it is a nightmare.”

Dr. Busby: Can I say something? Do we really believe that these people, all these nutcases that eventually get into office, do we believe that they really are the people who make the decisions? I mean, surely it is not them at all. They are just puppets. They are people who are chosen because they appeal to all the lunatics who vote for them, and so somebody goes along and figures out what level of lunatic is necessary to get the right sort of vote, and then they just provide the candidate to appeal to that set of lunatics. You know how it works.

Dr. Fetzer: What a terrible commentary on the state of politics. I mean we used to have responsible figures who were running for high office.

Dr. Busby: Oh come on. Ronald Reagan — you’re serious?

Dr. Fetzer: I am going all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and JFK. Yeah, Ronald Reagan, I know. Reagan’s presidency actually represented the turning point in American political history, Chris, because it was up until Reagan and since World War II that there had been a gradual diminution in the gap between the rich and the poor. You know, more and more equality. The labor unions were becoming strong. There was a very healthy middle class. America was a prosperous, productive, manufacturing and industrial center. And since Reagan all that has been reversed. The gaps have been growing wider, and when we have NAFTA and the WTO, all the jobs have gone worldwide with this globalization. And the United States, the middle class is…

Dr. Busby: I think it was perfectly clear to us in England, and it was certainly clear to me, that when Reagan appeared on the scene it was just Hollywood, you know. That what was being done there was just create a person, choose a person who was handsome and would appeal to the American people in some way, and then they would vote for him, and whoever was pulling his strings behind the scenes would have power. And that was that.

L. Moret: It was Henry Kissinger and the Rockefellers who put [correction: Reagan] in.

Dr. Busby: OK, OK, well, whoever, but anyway, that is the point, and all this discussion now about these lunatics who are standing at the moment, it is just more of the same, really.

Dr. Fetzer: [Laughter]

L. Moret: But the point is that it’s the Rockefellers who backed the candidates in every election, and they duped the American public into voting for Democrats that get set up with them, so they jump to Republicans in the next election, back and forth.

Dr. Busby: I am sure you are right, I’m sure you are right on that.

L. Moret: And every time, the Rockefellers get re-elected in reality, with no change.

Dr. Fetzer: So Leuren, let me ask you the following question, I mean, my impression has long been that the Rockefellers are on one side, and the Rothschilds are on another. So I mean –

L. Moret: They are on the same side.

Dr. Fetzer: Oh, I see.

L. Moret: The Rockefellers work for the Rothschilds.

Dr. Busby: I think they are all the same people, myself.

L. Moret: They are all the same people. But I want to talk about Iran. That is what I was trying to talk about that I forgot.

Dr. Fetzer: OK.

L. Moret: And what I discovered when I was writing a War Crimes Complaint for the Malaysia War Crimes Conference, is I started looking at Iran, and I looked at the demographics. And what I found was astounding. The Iranian fertility rate in women was over eight children per woman before Chernobyl in 1986. And one year after Chernobyl the fertility rate for the country of Iran had dropped by one child to seven children per woman. By 2002 the fertility rate had dropped to two children per woman. And by 2007 the fertility rate had dropped below one child per woman.

Fig. 6: CATASTROPHIC DECLINE IN FERTILITY RATES IN IRAN (1986-2002)

The decline in fertility rates in Iran began after 1986 following the Chernobyl disaster.  The rate of decline in fertility is linked globally to environmental deposition of radioactive pollution, and depends on geography and weather.  Clearly this UN graph of global fertility rates (1950-2050) [black on white] demonstrates that fertility rates in Iran [colored lines 1970-2002] have declined from the highest in the world before Chernobyl, to nearly the lowest in the world(Gilan Province and total rate for Iran) in the short period of 22 years .  The decline in Iranian fertility rates reported by province [in color] are highest in provinces with higher precipitation (Gilan Province), and lowest in the driest regions of Iran (Sistan and Baluchistan).  The effects of US and UK nuclear weapons used in Iraq since 1990, and Afghanistan since 2001, have clearly caused an undeclared catastrophic nuclear war against Iran. Source: World changes in fertility graph – UN Report “World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision”. Iranian Fertility Rates: M.J. Abbasi-Shavazi, multiple research papers.

Dr. Fetzer: Really?

L. Moret: Yes.

Dr. Fetzer: So over that period of time they went from greater than the replacement rate for the population, to something marginally below the replacement rate. That’s astounding.

L. Moret: And not only that — this is from the CIA Factbook, and then as soon as I started printing these out, the site was blocked so I couldn’t get anything, but I do have what I printed out then. And then between 2006 and 2007 the Iranian population was about 68.8 million in 2004. And in one year it dropped from 2006 to 2007 from 68.8 million to 65.2 million.

Dr. Fetzer: Really.

L. Moret: That is a catastrophic [5.2% in one year] drop .

Dr. Fetzer: They must have noticed 3 million plus deaths in Iran. They had to notice that.

L. Moret: That is a very, very, very dramatic decline in one year, and what is interesting in that same year, 2006 to 2007, five million [correction: many thousands of] camels died all over the Middle East and Central Asia.

Dr. Fetzer: Five million camels!

L. Moret: Five thousand just in Saudi Arabia alone. There were more millions [correction: thousands] all over Central Asia and the Middle East.

Dr. Fetzer: What is the normal number of camel deaths per year, do you have an idea? That sounds like a staggering number.

L. Moret: Well it goes with the extermination of people and the increases in infant deaths and the decline in fertility. The death rates increased. They started in 2006. The death rates started increasing in Iran. And then I started realizing, I started gathering a lot of information, like where are the dust clouds concentrated in Iran. They are over the Alborz and the Zagros mountains. The Alborz Mountains go east-west at the southern end of the Caspian Sea, and the Zagros go north-south on the border of Iran with Iraq. That is where the snowfall and the rainfall is the highest. That is where all the water comes from for Iran.

Fig. 7:  DUST STORMS AND RADIATION CONCENTRATION IN IRAN

July 5, 2009, satellite image (left) of the largest dust storm in memory in Iraq, spread to Saudi Arabia and Iran.  High summer temperatures and the shamal (northwest seasonal wind) caused the dust storm to rage in the Middle East for a week.  On the right the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite, measured the aerosol absorption optical depth of the dust.  The darkest brown areas represent the highest dust and depleted uranium concentrations in Iran, and the highest radiation contamination levels of the environment and water sources.  In the image on the left, the SE Asian Monsoon moving west over Afghanistan and Pakistan from India, rained out depleted uranium over northern Iran.  Source: Images – NASA, and Leuren Moret’s Kuala Lumpur War Crimes complaint for Iraq.

And I realized when I started following monsoons in that area, that region, and also I was just kind of investigating the geography and the weather, and I realized that Iran has been targeted with an intense nuclear war. Much more intense than in Iraq and Afghanistan since 1990, because Iran is getting clobbered with radiation from Afghanistan, from the war in Yugoslavia, and from Iraq. And they are getting more than Iraq and Afghanistan. They are just having catastrophic death rates. A catastrophic decline in fertility. They are below the replacement population needed now. And we have been carrying out — the British and the U.S.– a nuclear war against Iran without anyone even knowing it.

Dr. Fetzer: Well that is staggering, and I take it what you are implying is that the weather, the rain, is bringing all the contaminants out of the atmosphere into the water that is the source for the Iranian population, and that is the mechanism by which this is taking place.

L. Moret: You are exactly right.

Dr. Fetzer: Chris, tell me, now I am not familiar enough with the geography here to locate Chernobyl in relation to Iran, but would all those things that Leuren has been describing, which sound quite catastrophic, be probable consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, or of course she is adding contributing causes from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean this sounds quite stunning and appalling.

Dr. Busby: There was one plume that went from Chernobyl south and got down over Greece and northern Turkey, and I suppose it would have contaminated the mountains there too.

L. Moret: Well the fertility rate …

Dr. Fetzer: Hang on Leuren. Let Chris…

Dr. Busby: What I did notice is if you look at the mortality statistics, there does appear to be a sharp increase in infant mortality in many countries in Europe in 1991 which is kind of unexplained.

And I think perhaps that was caused by the First Gulf War. I think that is a reasonable explanation for it. And it is certainly true also that material from the first Gulf War was measured in the northern part of Iraq in the mountains of Kurdistan. I mean I met some Germans who were doing measurements of uranium on autopsy material from cows in the northern part of Iraq. So I think an awful lot of them — if you look at the weather patterns, an awful lot of the material from Iraq does go north into the mountains there and would therefore end up being rained, being washed down into Iran, and of course Iran is only just across the river from Iraq. So you know anything that is being produced in southern Iraq around about Basra and on the border you know would have drifted across the Euphrates and the Shatt al-Arab waterway into Iran.

Dr. Fetzer: So what do you think is the explanation for the diminishing reproduction rate in Europe?

Dr. Busby: Well, the same thing. Yes, sure. The same thing. I mean certainly in Belarus it began almost immediately after Chernobyl. And it is sort of like a double bump. And in other parts of Europe there was an infant mortality increase in 1991. And that is quite difficult to explain on the basis of Chernobyl. I mean I have tried to explain it. I have thought of all the various possible mechanisms. But it doesn’t really seem to follow the Chernobyl stuff. It is more likely something that happened in 1991. And of course we know what happened in 1991. There was an enormous distribution of radioactivity from all of the anti-tank weaponry that was used in Iraq.

Dr. Fetzer: We have got to take our next break. This is Jim Fetzer your host on “The Real Deal” with my very special guests today Leuren Moret and Dr. Christopher Busby. We will be right back.

[Part II will follow]

Jim Fetzer, McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth, is a former Marine Corps officer and the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

Leuren Moret is an independent geoscientist who has done expert studies on the Fukushima disaster, radiation problems around the world including depleted uranium.

Posted in Iraq0 Comments

Iraq War Crimes: Haditha: Another Small Massacre – No One Guilty

NOVANEWS

By Felicity Arbuthnot

Global Research

“We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected round the world.” (President Barack Obama, State of the Union address, 24th January 2012.)

On the 24th January, the day President Obama delivered his last State of the Union speech to Congress before the election, citing the: “selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces (their) focus on the mission at hand”, the “selfless” Staff Sgt., Frank Wuterich, leader of the massacre at Haditha, in Iraq, became the seventh soldier to walk free – from the mass murder of twenty four unarmed men, women and children, in three homes and a taxi.

It was another chilling, ruthless, cold blooded, up to five hour rampage, revenge for the death a colleague, in a roadside bomb – which had nothing to do with the rural families that paid the price.

The youngest to die was one year, the oldest was seventy six year old, wheelchair-bound amputee, Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. He died with nine rounds in the chest and abdomen.
Other children who died were aged 3,4,5,8,10 and 14.

On May 9th 2007, Sergeant Sanick De la Cruz received immunity from prosecution in return for testimony in which he said that he had watched Wuterich shoot five Iraqis attempting to surrender. He further stated that he and Wuterich had further fired in to the dead bodies – and that he had urinated on one of the dead Iraqis.

“Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed (US troops) example”, pondered the President in his speech – in a week which worldwide revulsion was expressed at a video of Marines, allegedly with the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, urinating on dead bodies in Afghanistan.

It was, of course:“behaviour … not in keeping with the values of the US Armed Forces … not consistent with out core values (or) indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps”, said a Defence Department spokeswoman.(i).

Ross Caputi – a former Marine who took part in another massacre, Falluja, exactly a year before Haditha, was sickened at what he saw and experienced, and now campaigns tirelessly for Iraq and for reparation for Falluja – disputes the Defence Department’s sunny view of “core values.
”These attitudes are common in the Marine Corps. The guys who peed on the poor dead Afghans were not ‘bad apples’, they were average Marines”, Caputi told this publication. For his outspokenness, Caputi has received such volume of chilling and obscene threats from former colleagues and US Service personnel (seen by the writer) that they stand testimony to his words.
As Afghanistan,the litany of Iraq’s blood-lettings are silent witness to “core values” of an altogether different kind. In an expression disturbingly mirroring “cleansed”, homes are “cleared.” Grenades are thrown in and then troops storm in, automatic rifles (and more grenades) blazing.

A description of the assault on one Haditha home, from a Lt. William T. Kallop records:
“The Marines cleared it the way they had been trained to clear it, which is frags (grenades)first … It was clear just by the looks of the room that frags went in and then the house was prepped and sprayed like, with a machine gun, and then they went in. And by the looks of it, they just … they went in, cleared to room, everybody was down.” (ii)
“Most of the shots … were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed in to walls or floors.” (iii)

As Marjorie Cohn’s meticulous, eye watering piece (see iii) points out, days after the mass murders at Haditha became public: “US forces killed eleven civilians, after rounding them up in a room in a house in Ishaqi”, in Salahuddin Province. All were handcuffed (presumably not the six month old) and executed. They were:

Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months

“A report by the US military found no wrongdoing by the US soldiers”, writes Professor Cohen.
There are Falluja’s football fields of mass graves, Najav’s hotel and hospital parks, turned graveyards, the pathetic uncounted ones in gardens, in yards, the lost buried in the family home, across Iraq, by families who would be also shot if they ventured with their beloved, to the cemetery.

In Falluja, reminiscent of other historic “cleansings”, categorized war crimes, men between fifteen and fifty five were forbidden to leave or enter their city.
Iraqi families shot in their cars by US service personnel are beyond counting – and indeed have not been: “It is not productive to count Iraqi deaths”, as the inimitable General Kimmit reminded the world.

Deaths included the family of Ali Abbas, by rogue US missiles, in the residential Zafaraniya suburb of Baghdad, with its evocative Convent and ancient Catholic church. Ali lost his pregnant mother, father, brother and thirteen other family members. He also lost his arms. He was twelve years old.

Allegations of summary executions have emerged from Tel Afar, whose blood drenched toddler, her parents shot by troops in their car, remains a never to be erased image; Samarra, Quaim, Taal al Jal, Mukaradeeb, Hamdaniya, Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul – and throughout the country.
In Mahmudiya, in 2008, fourteen year old Abeer Quasim Hamza, was gang raped then killed by five US servicemen – after they had murdered her mother, Fakriyah (34) father Qasim (45) and six year old sister. All were burned in an attempt to cover the crime. There were two convictions.
And never forget Abu Ghraib.

Long forgotten are the wedding and funeral massacres, a particular target for the US military, a litany. One, early in the invasion, was just a month after the first Falluja onslaught.
On 19th May 2004 forty six people celebrating a wedding in Mugrideeb village were mown down by assault helicopters, other attack planes and Marines.
USMC Major General James Mattis at the time simply commented: “How many people go to the middle of the desert to celebrate a wedding …?” He later said that it had taken him thirty seconds to decide to attack.

Eman Khammas of Iraq Occupation Watch braved the dangerous road out to the village as soon as she heard. She found carnage – and remains of the musicians’ instruments, decorations, pots, sacks of rice, improvised bread ovens, sacks filled with leftovers for the animals – all who had been shot – and surviving eyewitnesses.
There were blood stained toys, clothes, childrens’ hair slides, camera batteries. The family were sheep traders. Khammas recalled:

“The ground was full of bullets holes of different sizes, spots of blood every where, some a meter wide. In some of them the remains of human flesh were drying in the sun. . . . In one of these remains there was a long black lock still attached to the flesh. I could not see any more. I ran away back to the demolished house.”

Those mown down, of the Rakaad Naif family, as they celebrated were:
1. Mohammad Rekaad, 28

2. Ahmed Rekaad, 26
3. Talib Rekaad, 27
4. Mizhir Rekaad, 20
5. Daham Rekaad, 17
6. Saad Mohammad Rekaad
7. Marifa Obeid, Rekaad’s wife
8. Fatima Madhi, Rekaad’s daughter in law
9. Raad Ahmed, grandson, 3
10. Ra’id Ahmed, grandson, 2
11. Wa’ad Ahmed, grandson, 1 month
12. Inad Mohammad, grandson, 6
13. Anood Mohammad, granddaughter, 5
14. Amal Rekaad, daughter, 30
15. Anood Talib, granddaughter, 2
16. Kholood Talib, granddaughter, 6 months
17. Hamid Monif, son in law, 22
18. Somayia Nawaf, wife, 50
19. Siham Rekaad, daughter, 18
20. Hamda Suleiman, wife, 45
21. Rabha Rekaad daughter, 16
22. Zahra Rekaad daughter,15
23. Fatima Rekaad daughter, 4
24. Ali Rekaad son, 12
25. Hamza Rekaad, 6

Five from a family called Garaghool also died, thirteen of the band and three photographic crew. Forty six, mown down for celebrating a wedding..
Kholood, 8 months, Sabha, 22, Iqbal 14, Mouza, 12, Feisal and Adil (children, ages unknown) were hospitalized.

There were no prosecutions.
General Mark Kimmit, questioned on the liquidation of the party goers – the dead womens gold also torn from their necks by the troops, according to consistent survivors accounts – simply replied: “Bad people have parties too.” Asked about the near countless other acts of carnage, he responded:

“Change the channel.”
As the cost in Iraqi lives at the hands of US troops briefly hits the headlines again, some of the names that are known, in the perhaps 1.7 million lost, should be remembered. They are not “collateral damage” or “regrettable incidents”, each one is a unique human being, often a small, fledgling one.

In Haditha the victims were:
House One:
1. Abdul Hameed Hassin Ali, 76.
2. Khamisa Tuma Ali, 66, wife of Abdul.
3. Rashid Abdul Hamid, 30.
4. Walid Abdul Hamid Hassan, 35.
5. Jahid Abdul Hamid Hassan, middle aged.
6. Asma Salman Rasif, 32.
7. Abdullah Walid, 4.
Injured: Iman, 8 and Abdul Rahman, 5.
Escaped: Daughter-in-law, Hiba, with 2 month old Asia.
House Two:
8. Younis Salim Khalfif, 43.
9. Aida Yasin Ahmed, wife of Younis Salim, died shielding her youngest daughter, Aisha.
10. Muhammad Younis Salim, 10, son.
11. Noor Younis Salim, 14, daughter.
12. Sabaa Younis Salim, 10, daughter.
13. Zainabl Younis Salim, 5, daughter.
14. Aisha Younis Salim, 3, daughter.
15. One year old girl staying with the family.
Survived: Safa Younis Salim, 13, who pretended to be dead.
House Three:
16. Ajamal Ahmed, 41.
17. Marwan Ahmed, 28.
18. Qahtan Ahmed, 24.
19. Chasib Ahmed, 27. Brothers.
Taxi: Passengers were students at the Technical Institute in Saqlawiyah:
20 Ahmed Khadir, taxi driver.
21.Ahram Hamid Flayeh.
22.Khalid Ayada al-Zawi
23.Wajdi Ayada al-Zawri
24.Mohammad Battal Mahmoud.

Lance Corporal Roel Ryan Briones, who, seemingly, was not involved, was ordered to photograph the bodies. He picked up a little girl, shot in the head. The contents of her small skull spilled out on to his trousers. “I need immediate help”, he said.

What of help for then thirteen year old Safa, pretending to be dead amongst her family’s bodies. Of Hiba, lone survivor of her home, and her now six year old daughter?
What of the heroic Taher Thabet al-Hadithi, young journalist and human rights activist, who filmed every minute, bloody detail the following day, and amassed the truth of what had really happened, as the Defence Department were busy trying to cover their tracks? He fled to Syria in fear of his own life expectancy, should the US military learn of his evidence.
It was his witness materials that made its way in to Time magazine, engendering an “inquiry.” Evidence that was indisputable..

The reaction of Major General Steve Johnson, Commander of US Forces in the Province was salutary: “It happened all the time … it was just the cost of doing business …”
Routine massacres.

“The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe”, said President Obama, concluding his address, citing : “… the enduring power of our moral example … tyranny is no match for liberty.”

On the wall of the deserted house of one of the Haditha families, silent witness to this “moral example”, is written: “Democracy assassinated the family that was here.”

Notes

i. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2085378/US-troops-urinating-dead-Afghan-bodies-

video-used-Taliban-recruitment-tool.html#ixzz1lERqw3iC 

ii. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_killings 

iii. http://www.marjoriecohn.com/2012/01/haditha-massacre-no-justice-for-iraqis.html 

Posted in Iraq0 Comments

Is Writing Wrongs Right?

NOVANEWS 

By Rick Rogers – Front&Center: Military Talk Radio, Host

 

So there we were in Iraq: a reporter and a photographer embedded with Camp Pendleton Marines in 2004.

We stayed at Camp Baharia, a former Baathist resort nicknamed “Dreamland” and oddly kitted out with a child-size carnival ride and, less oddly, by a lakeside dance floor.

Two months earlier the murder of defense contractors had sparked what would come to be known as the First Battle of Fallujah in April.

The epic, final fight for the city would erupt the following November. We were there during the lull, though it didn’t always feel like it.

On our first day in country just as a lieutenant briefed us on a humanitarian mission scheduled that morning, heavy fighting flared.

The plans changed and we sped to reinforce Marines outside Fallujah getting pounded by torrents of small arms and mortar fire.

The phrase “shot out” announces in-coming enemy fire. Waiting for a mortar to hit are some very long seconds indeed. You might call them bonding moments.

The fighting ebbed and flowed for 8 hours before airstrikes ended it.

In the coming weeks, we got pretty close with the sailors we lived with and the Marines we covered; maybe too close.

An unwritten understanding exists between journalists and sources that some things just aren’t reported – at least at the time they occur. I don’t know if this is for better or worse, I just know that it is.

It was an easy decision not to write about blue movies and booze: It would’ve caused anguish and accomplished nothing except embarrass our hosts.

But sometimes the decision whether to write isn’t so easy.

This is one of those times.

For months now I’ve followed cases of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans engaged in what looks like escalating carnage here on the home front.

The latest incident just occurred in Orange County, where Iraq veteran Itzcoatl Ocampo, 23, was captured after allegedly stabbing a homeless man to death.

Ocampo is also the prime suspect in the stabbing deaths of three other homeless Orange County men.

Unfortunately Ocampo’s case does not stand alone.

  • At a New Year’s Eve party in the Seattle area, police say Iraq veteran Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, was involved in shooting four people. He later is suspected of shooting to death a Mount Rainier National Park ranger. He apparently died of exposure fleeing a police manhunt.

  •  Last week in Kansas City, police shot to death Robert G. Long, 26, an Iraq war veteran and medic who had threatened officers with a rifle after heavy drinking.

  •  In the first week of New Year Army National Guard Sgt. William Miller, 45, died in shootout with police in North Carolina, where he lived and had recently returned from his second deployment from Iraq. He had been home three days.

  •  Two weeks before Christmas, Delaware police arrested Army Staff Sgt. Dwight Smith, 24, and charged the Iraq and Afghanistan vet with first-degree murder and kidnapping.

  • Just before Christmas, Wisconsin National Guardsman Pvt. Alan Sylte Jr., 25, is suspected of shooting a police officer, who later died of his wounds. Sylte committed suicide.

  • In late November, police arrested Iraq veteran Joseph Scott Shriver, 23, after he allegedly shot an Alabama deputy in the face and wounded another officer.

Last year in Chicago a 24-year-old Afghanistan veteran Joseph Jesk was sentenced to 17 years for killing his wife; in Wisconsin, 23-year-old Iraq vet Matthew Magdzas killed his pregnant wife and young daughter before ending his own life.

In 2008, the New York Times found 121 instances of Iraq or Afghanistan veterans killing someone stateside – or of being charged with killing.

If the beginning of this column sounded like an apology for all that followed, it was. This news does not help veterans get jobs or diminish the challenges they face getting on with their lives.

San Diego County is home 30,000 Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans, the largest population of its kind in the nation. Yet the state funds the California Department of Veterans Affairs at the equivalent of starvation rations.

When our country needed these men and women, they stepped up when others stepped back. Now, they need us to step up.

Some times you can’t look the other way no matter how much you want to.

Posted in Iraq0 Comments

Targeting Journalists in Iraq

NOVANEWS
by Stephen Lendman

 

March 19 marks Operation Iraqi Freedom’s 9th anniversary. Brutal occupation continues. Thousands of US forces remain.

Obama’s alleged pullout repositioned troops nearby and left many there. Moreover, an army of paramilitary killers infest the country.

Overall conditions are grim, including millions of refugees, mass poverty and deprivation, rampant human rights and civil liberty abuses, and lack of basic services, including clean water, sanitation, electricity, health care and education.

Daily violence, chaos, terror, environmental toxins, and unmet human needs also punish Iraqis. So do lawless detentions, torture, lack of press and other freedoms, and daily misery. America destroyed the cradle of civilization. It no longer exists. The loss is incalculable.

Lack of press freedom alone is troubling. In February 2011, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report titled, “At a Crossroads: Human Rights in Iraq Eight Years after the US-Led Invasion.”

Topics covered included targeting female leaders and activists, human trafficking and forced prostitution, family violence, torturing detainees, refugees including internally displaced ones, the invisible impacts of war, and suppression of freedom including against journalists.

HRW’s section headlined, “Harassment, Threats, and Assaults against Journalists” discussed “numerous abuses” they face for exposing corruption and other official wrongdoing.

Journalists doing it face enormous risks. Two television presenter critics were “beaten by security officials on different occasions over the past two years.” A cameraman was dragged from his car and assaulted.

Others are arrested or receive death threats. One journalist said he received them dozens of times. One dated September 24, 2009 read:

“We will behead those who contribute to the perversion and corruptition of the lands of Islam.”

Another said, “Dig your grave, sew your death shroud, and write your will. Be prepared for your fate of death.”

After publishing a 2006 article on high-level Basra city council corruption, death threats forced a local journalist into hiding for his safety. He “paid a high price” for writing truthfully.

Other journalists told HRW that Baghdad and Basra security forces prevent them from filming or taking photographs in public. Terror attack sites are especially sensitive. On May 13, 2007, the Interior Ministry banned photographing bombing scenes. Allegedly it’s to let police secure affected areas and help victims. In fact, it’s to suppress truth.

During January 2009 provincial elections, journalists were prevented from entering polling stations, detained, beaten, and had their equipment confiscated and destroyed.

According to Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO) member Ziad, “The biggest problem that journalists have to deal with in Iraq is the dictatorship mindset of security officials.”

Security forces are “terrified” by cameras. “Iraq is a police state and the police here do not understand freedom of expression.”

According to New York Times photographer Joao Silva:

Iraqis know “the power of photographic images, and they know that if there are no photographs of a bomb, it has far less impact abroad.” It’s “definitely a culture of ‘See No Evil.’ ”

Journalists also told HRW they’re prevented from filming “non-contentious public sites.” Those trying are harassed, assaulted, detained, tortured, and lose their equipment.

Amnesty International (AI) on Human Rights in Iraq

In its 2011 report, AI found “disturbing evidence of targeted attacks on political activists, torture and other ill-treatment of people arrested in connection with protests, and attacks or threats against journalists, media outlets, government critics, academics and students.”

It reported deplorable conditions overall, including abuses and killings by armed groups, detention without trial, torture and ill-treatment, deaths in custody, persecuting former Ba’ath party officials, “serious” human rights violations by US forces, violence against women and girls, millions still living as refugees, 1,300 prisoners on death row, and another 279 sentenced to death.

Throughout the occupation, US forces are especially culpable. Their mission includes targeting journalists. In 2005, CNN’s then news division head, Eason Jordan, admitted during a Davos, Switzerland panel discussion that “he knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy.”

Damage control tried to whitewash his comments. Clear evidence supports them. Stating them publicly cost him his job. Earlier, BBC’s Kate Adie told Radio One Ireland that independent journalists are targeted. They still are.

In 2003, US forces killed journalists at Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel. At the same time, the Baghdad offices of Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV were targeted for broadcasting graphic footage.

In 2005, Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena was abducted and held hostage. Italian intelligence officers helped free her. En route to Baghdad International Airport heading home, US forces targeted them.

Nicola Calipari, a military intelligence major general was killed. Sgrena and another officer were wounded but escaped alive. At the time, an international outcry followed the incident.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Press Freedom in Iraq

In August 2010, RSF published a report titled, “The Iraq War: A Heavy Death Toll for the Media: 2003 – 2010.” It called it “the most lethal for journalists since World War II.”

From March 2003 – August 2010, 230 died. Virtually no prosecutions followed.

Iraq’s also “the world’s biggest market for hostages.” Over the same period, 93 journalists and other media professionals were abducted. At least 42 were executed. Another 14 remain missing.

Worse still, US forces arbitrarily and illegally target, arrest, detain, and kill independent journalists. They still do.

RSF’s report “pay(s) homage to all of the media professionals who gave their lives in order to keep the public informed, despite the risks they were taking.”

They indeed paid dearly. So have Iraqis. War, occupation, and repression “were nothing short of disastrous.”

Journalists still face harassment, assaults, detention or death for doing their job. America’s southern Iraq Camp Bucca is the Middle East’s largest prison for journalists.

On the same day RSF’s report was published, gunmen killed Al Iraqiya TV journalist Riyad Assariyeh as he left home.

On January 7, 2012, RSF listed the 10 most dangerous places for journalists in 2011. Overall, 66 were killed, 1,044 arrested, 1,959 assaulted or threatened, 499 censored, and 71 kidnapped. Naming Pakistan the year’s deadliest country for journalists, it said one-third of those killed were Middle East-based.

RSF also listed nations where journalists face the most extreme censorship and violence. The top 10 included Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Egypt, occupied Libya, Mexico, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria under siege, and Yemen. Clearly, Iraq’s among the most violent and dangerous annually.

As a result, many journalists fled for their safety. Some went to other Middle East countries Others sought asylum in Europe.

Russia Today Highlights the Iraq Problem

On January 7, Russia Today headlined, “Silent spring: Press gagged over Iraqi protests,” saying:

Press freedom’s “a long way off in a country where journalists say they are routinely imprisoned, beaten or simply killed by” US and state security forces.

Like elsewhere across the region, Iraqis also began protesting for freedom and social justice. However, journalists “trying to cover their protests were all but silenced by government security forces.”

HRW’s deputy director Joe Stark called journalists an “endangered species” in today’s Iraq, adding:

“There seems to be a high level of intolerance for dissent, or for public criticism of either government policies, or of particular leaders.”

Freelance journalist Yousif Al-Timimi said security forces targeted him for doing his job, saying:

“Three or four or five riot police were around me. One of them slapped me in the head. Another one kicked me in the butt, and they kinda grabbed me fast.”

Thanks to help from two foreign journalists, he managed to escape, but stopped covering protests for his safety.

“It became hard for journalists to” try. He stopped because he’s afraid of being arrested and mistreated.

Other Baghdad journalists were afraid to appear on camera. In northern Kurdish areas, RT’s Sebastian Meyer interviewed Ahmen, a photographer arrested for covering similar protests. Held for four days, he was tortured.

“….(S)ix men came to the room and started to shout at me and beat me with cables. Then they electrocuted me. They wanted me to admit that I hadn’t been at the protests.”

After release, a friend photographed his wounds and published them in a local magazine. Ahmed was again arrested and punished.

Afraid of reprisals, he requested his face be blurred in video footage and name changed.

In Baghdad, “government spokesman Ali Dabbagh (told) RT that” Iraqi officials suppress free press coverage, saying:

Press freedom “is not protected by the government. The government is against anything and you can see that there are people in the Ministry of the Interior, for example, they are misusing their power against citizens and against journalists. They keep accounts and some of them have been fired.”

RT concluded saying that nearly nine years after America showed up, credible press freedom’s absent. So is democratic governance without it.

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FALLUJAH BABIES: UNDER A NEW KIND OF NAZI SIEGE

NOVANEWS

Doctors and residents blame US weapons for catastrophic levels of birth defects in Fallujah’s newborns.

Dahr Jamail

Fallujah, Iraq – While the US military has formally withdrawn from Iraq, doctors and residents of Fallujah are blaming weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorous used during two devastating US attacks on Fallujah in 2004 for what are being described as “catastrophic” levels of birth defects and abnormalities.

Dr Samira Alani, a paediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, has taken a personal interest in investigating an explosion of congenital abnormalities that have mushroomed in the wake of the US sieges since 2005.

“We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine,” Alani told Al Jazeera at her office in the hospital, while showing countless photos of shocking birth defects.

As of December 21, Alani, who has worked at the hospital since 1997, told Al Jazeera she had personally logged 677 cases of birth defects since October 2009. Just eight days later when Al Jazeera visited the city on December 29, that number had already risen to 699.

“There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we’ve never seen them until now,” she said. “So when I describe it all I can do is describe the physical defects, but I’m unable to provide a medical term.”

Most of these babies in Fallujah die within 20 to 30 minutes after being born, but not all.

Four-year-old Abdul Jaleel Mohammed was born in October 2007. His clinical diagnosis includes dilation of two heart ventricles, and a growth on his lower back that doctors have not been able to remove.

Abdul has trouble controlling his muscles, struggles to walk, cannot control his bladder, and weakens easily. Doctors told his father, Mohamed Jaleel Abdul Rahim, that his son has severe nervous system problems, and could develop fluid build-up in his brain as he ages, which could prove fatal.

“This is the first instance of something like this in all our family,” Rahim told Al Jazeera. “We lived in an area that was heavily bombed by the Americans in 2004, and a missile landed right in front of our home. What else could cause these health problems besides this?”

Dr Alani told Al Jazeera that in the vast majority of cases she has documented, the family had no prior history of congenital abnormalities.

Alani showed Al Jazeera hundreds of photos of babies born with cleft palates, elongated heads, a baby born with one eye in the centre of its face, overgrown limbs, short limbs, and malformed ears, noses and spines.

She told Al Jazeera of cases of “thanatophoric dysplasia”, an abnormality in bones and the thoracic cage that “render the newborn incompatible with life”.

Rahim said many of his relatives that have had babies after 2004 are having problems as well.

“One of them was born and looks like a fish,” Rahim said. “I also personally know of at least three other families who live near us who have these problems also.”

For now, the family is worried how Abdul will fare in school when he is enrolled next year. Maloud Ahmed Jassim, Abdul’s grandfather, added, “We’ve seen so many miscarriages happen, and we don’t know why.”

“The growth on his back is so sensitive and painful for him,” Rahim said. “What will happen in school?”

Jassim is angered by a lack of thorough investigations into the health crisis.

“Why is the government not investigating this,” he asked. “Western media seem interested, but neither our local media nor the government are. Why not?”

In April 2011, Iraqi lawmakers debated whether the US attacks on the city constituted genocide. Resolutions that called for international prosecution, however, went nowhere.

Alani, along with Dr Christopher Busby, a British scientist and activist who has carried out research into the risks of radioactive pollution, collected hair samples from 25 parents of families with children who have birth defects and sent them to a laboratory in Germany for analysis.

Alani and Busby, along with other doctors and researchers, published a study in September 2011 from data obtained by analysing the hair samples, as well as soil and water samples from the city.

Mercury, Uranium, Bizmuth and other trace elements were found.

The report’s conclusion states:

“Whilst caution must be exercised about ruling out other possibilities, because none of the elements found in excess are reported to cause congenital diseases and cancer except Uranium, these findings suggest the enriched Uranium exposure is either a primary cause or related to the cause of the congenital anomaly and cancer increases. Questions are thus raised about the characteristics and composition of weapons now being deployed in modern battlefields.”

“As doctors, we know Mercury, Uranium and Bismuth can contribute to the development of congenital abnormalities, and we think it could be related to the use of prohibited weapons by the Americans during these battles,” Alani said.

“Findings suggest the enriched Uranium exposure is either a primary cause or related to the cause of the congenital anomaly and cancer increases,” says a recent scientific report on the incidence of birth defects in Fallujah [Dr Samira Alani]

“I made this link to a coroner’s inquest in the West Midlands into the death of a Gulf War One veteran… and a coroner’s jury accepted my evidence,” he told Al Jazeera.

“It’s been found by a coroner’s court that cancer was caused by an exposure to depleted uranium,” Busby added, “In the last 10 years, research has emerged that has made it quite clear that uranium is one of the most dangerous substances known to man, certainly in the form that it takes when used in these wars.”

In July 2010, Busby released a study that showed a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in Fallujah since the 2004 attacks. The report also showed the sex ratio had declined from normal to 86 boys to 100 girls, together with a spread of diseases indicative of genetic damage similar to but of far greater incidence than Hiroshima.

Dr Alani visited Japan recently, where she met with Japanese doctors who study birth defect rates they believe related to radiation from the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She was told birth defect incidence rates there are between 1-2 per cent. Alani’s log of cases of birth defects amounts to a rate of 14.7 per cent of all babies born in Fallujah, more than 14 times the rate in the affected areas of Japan.

In Babil Province in southern Iraq, the head of the Babil Cancer Centre, Dr Sharif al-Alwachi, said cancer rates have been escalating at alarming rates since 2003, for which he blames the use of depleted uranium weapons by US forces during and following the 2003 invasion.

“The environment could be contaminated by chemical weapons and depleted uranium from the aftermath of the war on Iraq,” Dr Alwachi told Al Jazeera. “The air, soil and water are all polluted by these weapons, and as they come into contact with human beings they become poisonous. This is new to our region, and people are suffering here.”

The US and UK militaries have sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, but Iraqi doctors like Alwachi and Alani, and along with researchers, blame the increasing cancer and birth defect rates on the weapon.

Abdulhaq Al-Ani, author of Uranium in Iraq, has been researching the effects of depleted uranium on Iraqis since 1991. He told Al Jazeera he personally measured radiation levels in the city of Kerbala, as well as in Basra, and his Geiger counter was “screaming” because “the indicator went beyond the range”.

Alani explained that she is the only doctor in Fallujah registering cases of congenital abnormalities.

“We have no system to register all of them, so we have so many cases we are missing,” she said. “Just yesterday a colleague told me of a newborn with thanatophoric dysplasia and she did not register it. I think I only know of 40-50 per cent of the cases because so many families have their babies at home and we never know of these, and other clinics are not registering them either.”

The hospital where Alani does her work was constructed in the Dhubadh district of Fallujah in 2008. According to Alani, the district was bombed heavily during the November 2004 siege.

“There is also a primary school that was built nearby, and from that school alone three teachers developed breast cancer, and now two of them are dead,” Alani said. “We get so many cases from this area, right where the hospital is.”

Even with a vast amount of anecdotal evidence, the exact cause of the health crisis in Fallujah is currently inconclusive without an in-depth, comprehensive study, which has yet to be carried out.        

But despite lack of governmental support, and very little support from outside Iraq, Alani is determined to continue her work.

“I will not leave this subject”, she told Al Jazeera. “I will not stop.”

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Iraq: Legacy of Deception and Its Costs

NOVANEWS

By Susan Lindauer

 

Most Americans are astonished to discover that right up to 9/11, the CIA was developing a “Real Politik” vision of Iraq that recognized the fast approaching collapse of U.N. Sanctions. The CIA was preparing for Peace—with a ruthless determination that the United States would capture the lion’s share of spoils from Iraqi Reconstruction contracts in any post-sanctions period.

German pilots transporting medical supplies and doctors into Baghdad International Airport at the end of the Clinton Administration had blasted the myth of invincibility surrounding sanctions. To this day, those pilots are anonymous—but they changed the equation in total. Their courage honoring the Berlin Airlifts in the Cold War was quickly copied. Across Europe and the Arab world, activists began to organize humanitarian flights into Baghdad. On the Security Council, France and Russia argued strenuously that the ban on air travel had been self imposed, and the no-fly zone could not prohibit humanitarian flights.

By this time, UN sanctions had killed over 1.7 million Iraqis; wiped out literacy in a single generation; and created artificial starvation in the world’s second most oil-rich nation. Iraq’s world class hospitals that once rivaled London and New York had been ravaged. Sick of the misery, the global community refused to stay silent any longer.

The CIA saw the writing on the wall. International loathing for “genocide by sanctions” had reached such a peak of outrage that there was no possibility of re-crafting the hated policy. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s vision of “smart sanctions” had come too late.

The CIA was determined to control the agenda for the advantage of the United States, however. And so quietly through my back channel, we undertook a proactive, covert dialogue over exactly what concessions Iraq would offer the United States, in exchange for lifting the sanctions. As a long-time opponent of sanctions myself, I was eager to get results.

That dialogue—even the existence of our back channel to Iraq’s Embassy at the United Nations from 1996 to 2003—was strictly covert, kept close and precious— away from Washington pundits and think tanks whose ignorance would have smashed all progress on the rocks. Our dialogue was no less vigorous for that secrecy.
This was the CIA at its best. Nobody got soft on Saddam’s government. By any measure, the CIA’s demands far exceeded the U.N. mandate to eliminate Iraq’s WMDs. If there was going to be peace, it would have to be rock solid, with zero chance that Baghdad would bite the United States in retaliation for those years of misery and death.

A Prosperous Peace for All

What emerged was a dynamic and comprehensive framework hammered out with Iraq’s Ambassador Dr. Saeed Hasan and senior diplomats in New York.

The agreement required weapons inspections “with no conditions.” But the deal accomplished much more. By February, 2001—nine months before 9/11—Baghdad authorized the FBI to send Terrorism Task Force into Iraq, with permission to conduct investigations and make arrests. After 9/11, Iraq sweetened its contribution with promises to hand over banking and financial documents on Al Qaeda figures. There’s no question but that Iraq’s cooperation qualified as the most substantial windfall in the War on Terrorism. Notably, it targeted actual terrorists— not Islamic charities or frightened taxi drivers and plumbers with the wrong accents and ethnic coloring.

Every time Senator John McCain or Dick Cheney pounded the lectern on CNN, and demanded an interview with Al Anai, or other cooperation— Iraq complied within hours.

THE PEACE DIVIDEND

Most importantly, the CIA was determined that the U.S. would retain a strong footing inside Iraq in all major economic sectors, in any post sanctions period.

The CIA envisioned a great Peace Bonanza for U.S. corporations that would have gorged American workers and shareholders with billions of dollars in revenues. It was a vision of prosperity and wealth creation, which put the United States at the center of the banquet table. The CIA wanted jobs, more jobs and profits. The goal was to rival the economic impact of the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after World War II, driving as many of those economic benefits to U.S. coffers as possible.

Iraq was happy to oblige. Those were days when the United States commanded such power on the world stage that other nations recognized Washington would have to be gratified in order for a change of policy to move forward.

And so Baghdad agreed to Every Single Demand put forth by the CIA— without complaint that U.S. conditions far exceeded the scope of the U.N. mandate for ending the sanctions.

* The CIA demanded and won Iraq’s agreement to allow all U.S. corporations to return to Baghdad, post-sanctions, at the same level of market share as before the first Gulf War in 1990.

* Iraq promised first tier oil concessions to U.S. Oil Corporations in all new exploration and development leases, with priority contracts for the purchase of American oil equipment. Baghdad also promised the U.S. could join existing oil leases held by other countries on a second and third tier basis.
*

* In January, 2003, Iraq offered the LUKoil Contract held by Russia to U.S. oil companies instead, in a final, tragic bid to avert War.

* By December, 2001, Iraq agreed to give preferential contracts, post-sanctions, to U.S. Corporations in telecommunications

* In fact, the CIA demanded and won Iraq’s agreement to give the U.S. preferential contracts in health care, hospital equipment and pharmaceuticals.

* Iraq agreed to buy 1 million American-manufactured automobiles every year for 10 years. This would have required imports from the U.S., not licensing of technology. That would have created thousands of high-paying Union jobs in the Rust Belt of America.

Imagine the modern day Global Economy if the CIA’s vision had prevailed. There would be no bankruptcy of the Middle Class. No housing foreclosure crisis. No government stimulus packages to bail out Banks or the U.S. automobile industry. There would be No Great Depression on All Points of the Global Horizon. This bounty would have extended to Britain and all of Europe and Asia. All countries would have joined the Feast of Reconstruction in Iraq. The prosperity flowing from this Peace Bonanza would have multiplied like loaves of bread throughout the world.

Imagine better schools. Universal health coverage. Substantial new investment in green energy, mass transit and infrastructure improvements. That’s what the Middle Class sacrificed in this Bonfire of the Vanities.

Republicans quickly recognized American voters would be irate over those costs. No longer fired with courage in the belly, and lacking the strength of conviction, Republicans shifted blame for their mediocre war policy onto the Intelligence Community—which had developed this peace framework— rather than take responsibility for their own decision making.

All three U.S. Assets covering the Iraqi Embassy in New York got thrown in prison as “Iraqi Agents,” citing the Patriot Act. All of us faced secret charges, secret evidence and secret grand jury testimony. Myself, I spent a year locked up on Carswell Air Force Base without a trial or hearing, threatened with indefinite detention.

In a violent effort to force to me to recant, I was threatened with forcible drugging with Haldol, Ativan and Prozac. Only thanks to blowback from the blogs and internet radio was the truth that I had lived saved from a chemical lobotomy.

There’s a reason why, and it bodes very badly for America.

THE COST OF WAR:

The tragic truth is that pulling U.S. soldiers out from Iraq will not reverse those negative consequences for the U.S. economy or taxpayers. The Middle Class is down for the count and not getting up. Our grand children will be financing this failed War in Baghdad with hefty income taxes to pay America’s creditors in China for decades to come. There’s serious question as to whether the War in Iraq has ended the “American Century.”

The United States has hemorrhaged $4 TRILLION on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and deficits continue to escalate in Kabul. Military spending for defense contractors has increased 81 percent since the 9/11 attack, while disability and health benefits for U.S. Veterans have stagnated.

* Over 4,000 U.S. Soldiers died in Iraq— while another 30,000 suffered serious traumatic injuries, paralysis, amputations and head injuries.

* An American soldier attempts suicide every 80 minutes, according to Veterans for Peace, which has demanded more community outreach to save their lives

* Post traumatic stress cripples tens of thousands of young American soldiers who face great difficulty returning to work and family life.

For all of the glory of U.S. military budgets, we have nothing to give our young people in uniform.
And that’s not all. What of that grand vision called the War on Terrorism?

Cunning like a fox, Saddam Hussein tried to give the United States banking and financial documents that would have closed down the financial pipeline feeding terrorism. Mostly that financing derives from heroin profits, which would have resulted in substantial seizures, and killed two birds with one powerful stone.

Yet for all the rhetoric, Republican leaders so desired to attack Saddam that they left all terrorism financing in circulation. There’s no question but those monies have financed attacks on U.S. and allied partners in Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Philippines—wherever radical Islam is engaged in violent retaliation against U.S. military operations.

And so the greatest irony is that the U.S. has financed our Enemies’ War on Terrorism against our own people. That’s just plain stupid. And dangerous.

The damage goes farther. Former CIA Director of Operations and head of the Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer argues that U.S. interventions are in danger of igniting another major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Guaranteed to outscore 9/11, the next attack will most likely involve a dirty nuclear attack on the financial district of New York City, which would push the global economy over the edge, into the abyss.

Pulling out of Iraq creates an opportunity to reduce that risk—but only if Washington learns the lessons of its past mistakes and resists the temptation to engage in new military mis-adventures.

The Weapons Trap in Iran

Indeed, as the world weighs another War against Iran, we must engage in a serious conversation as to whether any nation is worth the risk of destruction to our own?

Veterans and anti-war activists alike must force a consideration of what our economy has suffered already—since the value of human life has become so cheap. We must examine the costs of War to our economy, our taxpayers and our soldiers, with much greater clarity and honesty than Republicans in Congress applied to the War in Iraq.

Tragically, the War in Iraq has had an unexpected consequence. It has persuaded Iran of the dangers of nuclear disarmament. Baghdad would have been much less vulnerable to U.S. military adventurism, if only Saddam’s government had possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, per U.N. accusations. Baghdad’s inability to mount an effective defense created an irresistible provocation for War Hawks in Washington and London.

That lesson of the Iraq War is not lost on Teheran. On that contrary, it has proved to Iranian leaders that WMDs are vital to their future independence. Only a guarantee of “mutual assured destruction” will preserve the freedom of their country.

Unquestionably, that is the greatest tragedy of all, with more dangerous consequences to come.

One must ask: Would the CIA’s vision of peace been so terrible after all?
#####

Susan Lindauer is the author of Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq.

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Mainstream Media keeps al-Qaeda Myth Alive.

NOVANEWS

“Who’s going to object to referring to the Sunni insurgency in post-war Iraq as yet another attack by al-Qaeda?”

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat 

 

Lost in a proxy war.

While surfing the morning news, Most people would indifferently glance at this headline “Al-Qaida in Iraq says it was behind Baghdad blasts” and fail to grasp the real story behind it. But then, how could they not when the story is presented to them with such a deceiving title to begin with.

Now that the boys are out of the Iraqi swamp, a smart move in Obama’s electoral campaign,why should any American care what happens in that remote area on planet earth called Iraq- a place most Americans failed to locate on the map in a National geographic survey in 2006.

The American military and the so called coalition forces raided Iraq in 2003 in a search for the alleged presence of military training camps for the so called al-Qaeda and hidden depots packed with tons of weapons of mass destruction(WMD).

Neither was found … Nevertheless the American & coalition troops dragged their feet before they finally left Iraq.

And as Obama was saying to his returning soldiers “welcome home .. welcome home” his inner circle at the white house and Pentagon knew for a fact that this diplomatic move is more of a strategic repositioning of troops in the region ( in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain) than a full withdrawal, and that Iraq is bound to stay under the American strategic and military control till at least 2020. That if Iraq managed to linger as one nation for that long.

Last week and as Leon Panetta, the American defense secretary was declaring that the American war on Iraq had finally come to an end and that the boys would be home for Christmas he somehow forgot to say to the Iraqis Sorry fellows for all the mess and the killing we caused. Hope you hold no hard feelings for us and that you’d understand that we didn’t mean to bring about that much damage and chaos … we were only fooled by the Israelis and blindly acted on their misleading intelligence … and yes, maybe we dumped too much Depleted Uranium on your heads .. and maybe the black water guys overdid it, any way this game is over now .. and we will leave you fellows to sort this old grudge between the Sunnis and Shiites on your own.”

While the civil war now raging between Shiite and Sunni in Iraq is sometimes cast as an extension of an age-old religious struggle, today’s conflict is about something slightly more political.

But that is not how the Zionist- controlled mainstream media define and report this struggle. Whenever covering the deadly confrontations between the two sects; the Shiites are referred to as Iran-backed sect and the Sunni sect is conveniently referred to as al-Qaeda front group.

Despite the fact that the American/coalition troops couldn’t find any WMD nor any link between Sadam’s regime and the so called al-Qaeda simply because the whole story of al Qaeda is nothing but a CIA/Mossad masterpiece operation.

Nevertheless, it won’t hurt anyone especially that Osama Bin Laden is now lying in the bottom of some sea serving as fish food, to keep this myth alive. Who’s going to object to referring to the Sunni insurgency in post-war Iraq as yet another attack by al-Qaeda?

The Bush/Obama administration used it so did Gaddafi in Libya, Saleh in Yemen and now Bashaar el-Assad in Syria … so why not keep this myth alive, it will surely come in handy, in case Israel decided it is time they fooled the Americans once again into yet another and uglier war in Iran.

US soldiers board the last C17 aircraft carrying US troops out of Iraq

Al-Qaida in Iraq says it was behind Baghdad blasts

BAGHDAD (AP) — An al-Qaida front group in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the wave of attacks that ripped through markets, cafes and government buildings in Baghdad on a single day last week, killing 69 people and raising new worries about the country’s path.

The coordinated attacks struck a dozen mostly Shiite neighborhoods on Thursday in the first major bloodshed since U.S. troops completed a full withdrawal this month after nearly nine years of war. They also coincided with a government crisis that has again strained ties between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites to the breaking point, tearing at the same fault line that nearly pushed Iraq into all-out civil war several years ago.

The claim of responsibility made no mention of the U.S. withdrawal. Instead, it focused its rage on the country’s Shiite-dominated leadership, which Sunni insurgents have battled since it came to power as a result of the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

“The series of special invasions (was) launched … to support the weak Sunnis in the prisons of the apostates and to retaliate for the captives who were executed,” said the statement in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq.

For more articles by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat visit his website

CIA Agent Exposes How Al-Qaeda Dosen’t Exist


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IsraHelli Group Claims Responsibility for Iraqi Bombings – Sort Of

NOVANEWS

SITE Intelligence, Reputed Mossad Operation Claims to Credit Al Qaeda for Iraq Bombings

 

 by  Gordon Duff,  Senior Editor

Mossad Bombings in Iraq Wrongly Credited to Al Qaeda

The recent round of bombings in Iraq, according to an Israeli source credited with endless false reports, phony bin Laden tapes and videos and numerous other obfuscations yesterday claimed Al Qaeda was responsible for the recent bombings in Iraq.

The organization run by the daughter of a convicted Israeli spy was the only source, no intelligence organization in the world found the website SITE claimed it found.  This is always the case.  Site Intelligence always finds the story Israel or American neocons need, exactly when they need it, always “too good to be true” and, thusly, not true at all.

This is another of those cases, part of a long history of disinformation paid for by the FBI and DOD, the fictional subtext for the war on terror, the needed blame for the Taliban or Al Qaeda even when there were no facts to be found.

There are a few problems with the story.

US counter-intelligence sources in Baghdad indicate there are no Al Qaeda forces in Iraq and, if there were, there would be no reason for them to randomly attack “everyone at the same time.”

On the other hand, Israel has recently moved troops and aircraft into Kurdistan without government approval and is the only possible “player” to benefit from a civil war in Iraq.

Knowledgeable sources have, for years, credited Israel with church and mosque bombings throughout Iraq, attacks on American forces and even video-sniper attacks found, as is always the case, by only SITE Intelligence and not the 16 American intelligence agencies with their tens of thousands of employees, their dozens of satellites and their armies of Arabic speaking operatives that scan the internet day and night.

An Israeli company with 2 employees has, 100% of the time, found the “Al Qaeda” announcements and the carefully time “bin Laden” threats.  From an earlier article commenting on inconsistencies in SITE reporting:

A further abuse, of course, is not only that we are no longer seeing the easily debunked bin Laden doubles whose video tapes were “mysteriously” released by SITE Intelligence, the Rita Katz/Israeli group that seems to find them in trash bins behind delicatessens. The “new” audio tape itself contains statements claiming credit for 9/11 in direct contradiction to the real bin Laden videos, the only ones authenticated.

If you wondered why the FBI doesn’t list Osama bin Laden as a suspect in 9/11, I think you have your answer. If they think the bin Laden “admissions” aren’t credible, I wonder who the FBI is investigating or if they have simply been told to mind their own business.

The terrorist incident itself is the last thing Al Qaeda would ever take responsibility for despite the claims by SITE Intelligence that they found an unnamed and unverified internet site that confirmed this.

Who in the name of all that is holy would want to take responsibility for an idiot who was led onto an American bound plane by passing around searches, customs and passport control in an airport run by an Israeli security company but who carried a “bomb” designed by a three year old.

Bombings such as those in Alexandria, across Pakistan, Iran and Iraq and now Nigeria are signature Mossad “false flag” terror operations.  The rationale is either to start civil war or sell security equipment to the victims.

In every single case, only Israel benefits, no other party.  In fact, whenever SITE Intelligence is tied to reporting a terror incident, it is not unreasonable to assume that Israeli groups are responsible.

Marketing Phony Terrorism

In every single case, only SITE Intelligence is the source of the finger pointing away from Israel.

Tapes and videos submitted by SITE have long been debunked as falsified and counterfeit.  Al Qaeda statements are all assumed to be the same, mythology written in Tel Aviv to cover their operation in Kurdistan and with the PKK in Turkey, taking advantage of the US withdrawal from Iraq.

Sources indicate that Israel already has drones in Kurdistan, put their without the permission of the Iraq government, has moved troops into Kurdistan as part of an occupying force and is operating against Iran from positions in Iraq.

Recent sightings of “non Arabic speaking” troops moving through Jordan recently are now believed to have been Israeli units moving off the Golan Heights in generic military attire.

More bombings are expected in Iraq as are attacks on American facilities inside the Green Zone.  It is expected that SITE Intelligence will, of all the sources in the world, learn that it is “Al Qaeda” that is responsible.

Israeli forces have been active in the Mosul region for years, supporting PKK terrorist cells in Turkey and in orchestrating tensions between the Chaldean Christian community and local Muslims.

Israel considers Kurdistan part of “Greater Israel” and Likudist leaders have indicated a desire to annex Kurdistan.  The more formalized occupation of portions of Kurdistan by uniformed IDF personnel is a significant increase in visibility.

It is also a direct challenge to the government in Baghdad and is likely to exacerbate sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis.

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Carnage in Baghdad: New Fear, New Game

NOVANEWS

By Ismail Salami

A string of 16 bomb explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital on Thursday, leaving 72 people dead and 217 others fatally wounded.

 

There is a new fear emerging in Iraq that the country will plunge even more into turmoil and political disequilibrium as the US troops cased in their colors and left behind a country which they helped lay bare to waste and dereliction.

This feeling of angst deepened when a string of 16 bomb explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital on Thursday, the worst in four months, leaving 72 people dead and 217 others fatally wounded.

Roughly coinciding with the homecoming of the US troops, the incident was opportunistically ascribed by Western observers to the security vacuum created as a result of the withdrawal of the US forces.

As a way of diverting attention from the real cause for these unspeakable acts of terrorism, some pointed fingers at Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, who had recently been accused by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki of orchestrating assassinations and bombings in Iraq, an allegation he has strongly rejected.

However, this seems to be a remote plausibility as the Iraqi interior ministry issued an arrest warrant for him on Monday and that he did not have enough time to engineer these professionally organized acts of terrorism, which certainly took a lot of time, maybe weeks.

Still licking his wounds, Iraq’s Vice-President Tariq Hashemi, however, shifted the blame on Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and said he is to blame for the upsurge of violence that started in the country, implicitly aggrandizing the presence of the US troops and accused Maliki of behaving like Saddam Hussein.

“Many of Saddam’s behaviors are now being exercised by Maliki unfortunately,” Hashemi said.

“The judicial system is really in his pocket,” he said.

Hashemi, who is presently holed up in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, accused Maliki of leadership deficiency.

“What happened today shows the deficiency and it’s a good evidence for the lack of control over administration of the security brief, because the security services are pointed in the wrong direction.”

The vice president also told US magazine Foreign Policy that “many of Saddam’s behaviors are now being exercised by Maliki unfortunately”.

Although no one has assumed responsibility for the attacks, military experts say that the level of coordination shows a well-organized planning only available to al-Qaeda in Iraq or more possibly to the US intelligence agencies as Washington has ample reason to demonize Maliki in order to inculcate the idea that the withdrawal of the US troops was a mistake and that their presence was a blessing to the Iraqis and a guarantee for their security. Further to that, US warmongers will be in a better position to push ahead with their policies and diminish the power of President Obama whom they see as the weakest link in their united front against Iran.

Contributing to this line of thinking, Western media have brought Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki under severe criticism, comparing him to the executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and accusing him of promoting sectarianism.

Some observers say that Obama administration should share the blame as it “risked just such a breakdown when it disregarded the recommendation of its military commanders that some US forces remain in Iraq to help guarantee against a return to sectarian conflict” (The Washington Post, 22 December 2011).

Maliki has also been accused of pursuing “a sectarian agenda” or seeking “authoritarian power”. As if in coordinated efforts, most of the Western media insinuated that Nouri al-Maliki is bringing back the old days of Saddam Hussein.

Naturally but not strangely, US intelligence agencies had predicted that security in Iraq might degenerate into sectarian violence after the withdrawal of US troops from the country. This should be a surprise to no one that this is happening,” said House of Representatives intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers.

“Most people believed, the assessments that were coming out believed, that the sudden rapid withdrawal with no troop presence on the ground was going to leave this vacuum that would be filled with the kind of problems that you’re seeing,” Rogers, a Republican, said in an interview with Reuters.

Washington is clearly creating chaos in the troubled country to justify its previous and possibly future presence and eliminate from its path whoever can be a game-player or a game-changer e.g. Iran and Maliki. In between, they have never ignored the increasing influence of Iran which they fear most.

Rogers also referred to “a chaotic Iraq plays into Iran’s desire for increased influence in that region.”

“There was plenty of advice and counsel and analytical product that said this was a bad idea and here’s what’s going to happen if you do it,” he said. “We see the beginnings of what was predicted were going to happen.”

If the US government manages to convince the international community into believing that their presence in Iraq was to the best interests of the country and its people, it might have another chance to engage in a new phase of occupation and colonization.

To Washington, the loss of political leverage in Iraq is tantamount to the loss of future leadership in the Middle East region. Therefore, the US government will play every possible card to have another chance to be back in the country.

In fact, Washington is making fresh attempts to portray Nouri Maliki as a new Saddam Hussein, convince the international community that without the presence of US troops, there will be forever a security vacuum in the country, and eventually pave the way for the re-occupation and re-colonization of the country and reap at its leisure the fruit of its colonialist endeavors.

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Iraq Issues Arrest Warrant for VP

NOVANEWS
 Vice-President Tareq al-Hashimi

Iraqi government issued on Monday an arrest warrant for Vice-President Tareq al-Hashimi for suspected ties to assassinations and bombings.

Spokesman for interior ministry, Adil Daham, said the warrant for Hashimi was on “terrorism charges” related to alleged links to assassinations of government officials.

“An arrest warrant was issued for Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi accordingto Article 4 of the terrorism law and is signed by five judges… this warrant should be executed,” Daham told a news conference, waving a copy of the document in front of reporters.

The state-run television aired what it said it were confessions by “terrorists” linked to Hashimi.
The men said, during the tape broadcast, they had been paid by the VP’s office to carry out killings at several government ministries as well as Baghdad police officers.

The three men shown on television detailed the assassinations they were told to carry out by Hashemi’s aides including planting roadside bombs and drive by shootings of security and government officials.

One man said he was handed $3,000 as a reward by Hashemi himself.

The VP left Baghdad on Sunday for the semi-autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan, in a move that appeared to bemotivated by hopes that Kurdish authorities would not turn him in. Investigative judges banned him the same day from traveling outside of Iraq.

Malki

Two weeks earlier, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused Iraqi politicians of being behind a recent spate of assassinations of senior military and civilian officials.

Maliki did not name any specific individuals, but he said political parties and security guards were involved.

“Recently, the number of assassinations has increased,” he told reporters at a news conference in Baghdad.

“Certainly, this is the work of Al-Qaeda, but there have also been political assassinations and we will publicly denounce those who are behind the killings, their security guards and their political parties.”

Source: Agencies

Iraq in political turmoil only days after US withdrawal

Published Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders have called for talks to head off a worsening crisis since a warrant was issued for the Sunni vice president, an aide said.
“Maliki is calling for a conference of heads of political blocs and political leaders to discuss their differences, and to sort out the current security and political crisis,” Ali Mussawi, media adviser to the premier, said on Tuesday.

Days after US forces left the country and on the eve of the first anniversary of the government, Iraq’s political truce looked to be unraveling.

The Iraqiya List, the main Sunni-backed parliamentary bloc, is boycotting the cabinet, while Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has called for the sacking of one of his deputies, a Sunni who branded the Shia-led government a “dictatorship.”

Osama al-Nujaifi U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (R) and Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi pose for photographs and make brief remarks before a meeting at the Department of State June 24, 2011 in Washington, DC. Al-Nujaifi said he received a joint Iraqi-U.S. report this week that the amount of money missing from a fund from Iraqi oil proceeds is about $18.7 billion, more than the $6.6 billion reported earlier.
 parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi

The White House voiced concern over the developments, and multiple Iraqi leaders called for a national conference of the country’s political blocs to break the deadlock.
“I call for a national conference, at a time when the political process is subject to strong and dangerous shocks with undesired consequences,” parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi said in a statement.

Nujaifi, who along with Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak is a Sunni and a member of the Iraqiya bloc, warned that Iraq faced “crucial days.”

His call for talks echoed that of Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, who cautioned on Monday that “the situation is headed towards deep crisis.”

Massoud Barzani with Rice
“The ruling partnership has become threatened,” said Barzani, who in November 2010 hosted a meeting of Iraq’s leaders at which the foundations of the national unity government were laid, ending months of impasse following elections in March that year, with a cabinet eventually named on December 21.

On Monday, a five-member judicial panel issued a warrant against Hashemi on anti-terror charges, an interior ministry spokesman said. The vice president has also been banned from overseas travel.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the United States, whose troops completed their withdrawal from Iraq over the weekend, “have expressed our concern regarding these developments.”

“We’re urging all sides to work to resolve differences peacefully through dialogue, in a manner consistent with the rule of law and the democratic political process,” he said.

News of the warrant came with Hashemi in Kurdistan and as state broadcaster Al-Iraqiya TV aired footage showing what the interior ministry said were Hashemi’s bodyguards confessing to planning and carrying out terror attacks, and receiving funding and support from Hashemi.
At least 13 of Hashemi’s bodyguards have been detained in recent weeks, though it was unclear how many were still being held.

Hashemi’s office said only three were arrested, and has complained of “intentional harassment” in the form of a security force blockading his home for several weeks, as well as other incidents.

Iraqiya, meanwhile, said it would boycott cabinet meetings to protest Maliki’s “dictatorship,” after earlier saying it was suspending its participation in parliament.

Mutlak
 ”This decision is based on the deterioration of the political process, and to ensure that the country will not head towards a catastrophe if Maliki’s dictatorship continues,” Mutlak, who Maliki said over the weekend should be sacked, told AFP.

Lawmakers are due to consider Maliki’s request to fire Mutlak on January 3.

Iraqiya, which holds 82 seats in the 325-member parliament and controls nine ministerial posts, has not pulled out of the national unity government.

Iraqiya, which garnered most of its support from the Sunni Arab minority and emerged with the most seats in March 2010 elections, was out-maneuvered for the premiership by Maliki who finished second in the polls.
(AFP)

Maliki Govt. Issues ‘Terrorism’ Arrest Warrant Against Sunni VP

Facing Coalition Collapse, Officials Seek to Arrest Top Rival

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