5.7 million plus 1.7 million - 500,000 Iraqi Children, plus 1. 455,590,
Polya calculates that since 1950, 5.2 million Iraqis died during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering coups, installing and re-installing dictators, until Saddam himself obtained power [Gideon Polya, “Iraq Death Toll Amounts to a Holocaust”, Australasian Science (June 2004, p. 43); Polya, Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950 (Melbourne: LaTrobe, 2007)] ...
...from 1991 to 2002 under the Anglo-American imposed UN sanctions regime, UN data confirms a death toll of 1.7 million Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children.
Lancet’s figures could be empirically verified if journalists visited several locations at random in Iraq and discovered local reports of 4 or 5 times more deaths (than US-controlled Iraqi Health Ministry figures).
U.S. Veteran Reveals Atomic Bombs Dropped on Afghanistan and Iraq
If this thoughtful and well-documented report from Will Thomas is correct, “our” leaders are by far the worst war criminals in history. By opening the door to the use of nuclear weapons, they are ushering in the final holocaust—an act far worse than the crimes of the Nazis and Stalinists.
73,846 U.S. TROOPS KILLED IN IRAQ
1,620,906 PERMANENTLY DISABLED
More Gulf War Veterans have died than Vietnam Veterans.
The Department of Veterans Affairs, May 2007, Gulf War Veterans Information System reports the following: Total U.S. Military Gulf War Deaths: 73,846
– Deaths amongst Deployed: 17,847
– Deaths amongst Non-Deployed: 55,999
Total "Undiagnosed Illness" (UDX) claims: 14,874. Total number of disability claims filed: 1,620,906
- Disability Claims amongst Deployed: 407,911
- Disability Claims amongst Non-Deployed: 1,212,995
Percentage of combat troops that filed Disability Claims 36%. The real impact of those who are disabled from the US invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Nations, is not fully reflected in the official Veterans Affairs numbers.
More than 1,820 tons (3-million, 640 thousand pounds) of radioactive nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armor piercing rounds and bunker busters, representing the worlds worst man made ecological disaster ever. 64 kg of uranium were used in the Hiroshima bomb. The U.S. Iraq Nuclear Holocaust represents far more than fourteen thousand Hiroshima's.
The nuclear waste the U.S. has exploded into the Middle East will continue killing for billions of years and can wipe out more than a third of life on earth. Gulf War Veterans who have ingested the uranium will continue to die off over a number of years.
Iraqi birth defects are up 600% – the same will apply to U.S. Veterans. Statistics and evidence published by the government and mainstream media in no way reflect the extreme gravity of the situation.
Les Roberts, co-author of the 2004 and 2006 Lancet reports, argued that Britain and America might by then have triggered in Iraq "an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide", in which 800,000 people were killed.
(Roberts, 'Iraq's death toll is far worse than our leaders admit,' The Independent, February 14, 2007; http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2268067.ece)
The key importance of the new poll is that it provides strong evidence for this claim, and strong support for the findings of the 2006 Lancet study, which reported 655,000 deaths. Roberts sent this email in response to the ORB poll:
"The poll is 14 months later with deaths escalating over time. That alone accounts for most of the difference [between the October 2006 Lancet paper and the ORB poll]. There are confidence interval issues, there are reasons to assume the Lancet estimate is too low but the same motives for under-reporting should apply to ORB.
Overall they seem very much to align. (e.g. both conclude that: most commonly violent deaths are from gunshot wounds [in contradiction to IBC and the MOH*], most deaths are outside of Baghdad [in contradiction to the other passive monitoring sources which tallied ~3/4th of deaths in the first 4 years in Baghdad and have only recently attributed even 1/2 as being elsewhere], Diyala worse than Anbar....)." [* MOH = Iraqi Ministry of Health] (Email to Media Lens and others, September 14, 2007)
And yet, despite its obvious significance, the ORB study has been almost entirely blanked by the US-UK media. At time of writing, four days after the findings were announced, the poll has been mentioned in just one national UK newspaper - ironically, the pro-war Observer. It has been ignored by the Guardian and the Independent.
The BBC’s Newsnight may have been alone in providing TV broadcast coverage. The programme devoted the first 28 minutes of its September 14 edition to the financial crisis at Northern Rock bank. At 28:53 anchor Gavin Esler said: “More than a million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in 2003, according to the British polling company ORB. The study’s likely to fuel controversy over the true, human cost of the war. It’s significantly up on the previous highest estimate of 650,000 deaths published by the Lancet last October.
The Media Ignore Credible Poll Revealing 1.2 Million Violent Deaths In Iraq
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7005
http://www.deepjournal.com/p/7/a/en/3040.html
http://warisacrime.org/content/unreported-iraqi-war-deaths-revealed-wikileaks-are-only-tip-iceberg
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/14/pentagon-refuses-clarify-iraqi-death-tally-figures/
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Decade of Shame: The U.S. War on Iraq
January 16, 1991: The Bombing of Baghdad. On January 16, 1991, the U.S. launched "Operation Desert Storm" against Iraq and its people. For the next 42 days, the huge military might of the main imperialist power on the planet, joined by its allies, was unleashed on a poor Third World country. U.S. and allied planes pounded Iraq--averaging 2,000 sorties a day.
By the time the war was over, they had dropped 88,000 tons of bombs, equivalent to over seven Hiroshimas.
I traveled to Iraq as an RW correspondent in June of 1991, some three months after the end of the Persian Gulf War. From Amman, Jordan, I went to Baghdad, Iraq's capital, and then south to Basra, near the war zone. I also briefly visited Iraqi Kurdistan to the north and east of Baghdad. Along the way I talked to as many people as I could--doctors, workers, housewives, business people, government officials.
I saw the devastation wrought by the war: bombed-out hospitals, apartment buildings, bridges, roads, water plants, and factories. And I learned of the Iraqi people's determination to survive the bombs and everything else the U.S. had thrown at them.
But almost ten years later, the thing I remember most clearly is the children--in hospital after hospital, in Baghdad and Basra and places in between. Children so thin from being sick and malnourished that it seemed they might break if held too tightly. Their mothers keeping a vigil by their bedsides, helpless to save them.
The horror of it all was that this wasn't the result of some unknown disease or a new scourge like AIDS. This slow, painful, heartbreaking death was from starvation and ordinary diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, pneumonia, and whooping cough which should be easily treatable. But the U.S. war machine had destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, making the delivery of safe, clean water impossible.
And the U.S. strangulation of Iraq meant it couldn't import needed foods, medicines, and equipment to prevent ordinary illness from turning into the nightmare of starvation and death.
Today, the scene hasn't changed all that much: children are still wasting in Iraq's hospitals and dying at the rate of some 4,500 a month because U.S. economic sanctions and U.S. military assaults continue against Iraq.
The U.S. war on Iraq was--and continues to be--a high-tech mass murder from a safe distance, directed mainly against the civilian population. There has not been one shred of right or justice in anything the U.S. has done to Iraq for the last ten years. Every justification the imperialists have uttered is a lie; every action they've taken a shameful crime.
When the bombing started ten years ago, the U.S. claimed it was striking with "surgical precision." But in reality, military targets weren't the only things hit; so were homes, apartment buildings, hospitals, bridges, factories, water and power plants, bomb shelters, and government offices. A direct missile hit on the Amiriya air raid shelter in Baghdad killed hundreds of civilians.
On February 22, 1991, the U.S. launched its 100-hour ground war. Heavily armed U.S. units drove deep into southern Iraq, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake. On February 26, the U.S. attacked Iraqi troops as they were trying to retreat north on the road from Kuwait to Basra; U.S. planes bombed both ends of the road, cutting off escape, then massacred the troops in between. The six-lane highway from Kuwait City to Basra was littered with burnt-out tanks, trucks, and bodies; it became known as the "highway of death."
U.S. massacres continued after the February 27 cease-fire. On March 2, the Army's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division killed thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers--including by firing into a crowd of 350 disarmed prisoners. The officer in charge--General Barry McCaffrey--later became the "drug czar" under President Clinton and a pointman for stepped-up U.S. intervention in Colombia.
The U.S. claimed there were 13,000 Iraqi casualties in the war; studies since the war put the real figure closer to 200,000.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the U.S. began a massive troop build-up in the name of "liberating Kuwait" and "protecting peace and democracy." But the Kuwaiti regime actually is a reactionary pro-Western kingdom. And the fact that the assault on Iraq continued long after this feudal dictatorship was restored exposed the true U.S. aims.
The U.S. imperialists' real objectives were to tighten their stranglehold on the Persian Gulf--where two-thirds of the world's oil reserves are located--and their domination of the Middle East, a critical political, geographic and military crossroads between Asia, Africa and Europe. Many other countries around the world depend on Gulf oil to fuel their economies. The military and strategic control of this region is crucial to the U.S.'s position as the world's top-dog imperialist power.
The Gulf War was about propping up the most loyal pro-U.S. regimes in the region, while punishing any forces, like Iraq, who might in any way challenge this setup. The war against Iraq was also aimed at strengthening Israel and forcing an unjust peace upon the Palestinian people.
And, in 1991, the U.S. also wanted to deliver a message--written in the blood of the Iraqi people--to the whole world: the Soviet Union had collapsed, and there was now a "new world order." The U.S. was Number 1--the globo-cop--and it would viciously assault any who dared stand in its way.
In the ten years since "Operation Desert Storm," much has been revealed about the enormous atrocities and war crimes committed by the U.S. and its allies during the Gulf War. The U.S. deliberately attacked Iraq's civilian infrastructure--knowing full well that this would mean the deaths of tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis.
The Sunday Herald of Scotland recently reported on a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document detailing how the U.S. planned to systematically destroy Iraq's water system by bombing dams and water and sewage facilities. Before the war 96% of Iraqis had access to clean drinking water; three years after the war only 45% did. Eight out of every ten instances of disease in Iraq today results from contaminated water. So the U.S. has been waging a form of germ warfare against the Iraqi people.
Over 500 tons of radioactive depleted uranium shells were fired at Iraqi forces. Upon impact, the uranium in these shells oxidizes into a fine mist which can be readily inhaled into the lungs and which contaminates food and water supplies. Iraqi doctors report that cancer rates are now four times higher than in 1991 and that this epidemic is killing thousands of Iraqis near the war zone, including children who weren't even born during the war. Depleted uranium is also thought to be a factor in the "Gulf War Syndrome" that afflicts many U.S. soldiers.
A cease-fire between the U.S.-led coalition and Iraq was declared on February 27, 1991. But the U.S. has continued the war on this oppressed country through sanctions, military strikes, and subversion. More people have been murdered after the war officially ended than while it was officially going on!
U.S. pressure has kept the economic sanctions in force. Iraq can only sell a portion of its oil (the country's main source of income) in exchange for food and is also banned from importing many needed goods, such as medicine. The sanctions are a devastating weapon of war on a country which is dependent on foreign sources for much of its food, medicine, and industrial technology.
In 1997 the UN reported that over 1.2 million Iraqis had died since the Gulf War as a result of medical shortages, including 750,000 children below the age of five. In 1999, UNICEF, a UN organization focusing on children, reported that Iraqi kids under five are dying at twice the rate they were before the sanctions began. Over one-quarter of Iraqis born since the Gulf War are underweight. Denis Halliday, a UN official who supervised the "oil for food" program in Iraq, quit his position because he said the U.S. and its allies were committing "genocide" against the Iraqi people.
After the cease-fire, the U.S. stole the skies over Iraq by declaring that large parts of north and south Iraq were "no-fly" zones for Iraqi aircraft. Over the last ten years, U.S. planes have flown over 280,000 sorties in Iraq. For much of 1998-99, U.S. and British planes struck Iraq every day, firing thousands of missiles. In the last two years, over 300 Iraqis have been killed in these bombings. This air war has barely been mentioned in the mainstream U.S. media.
The CIA has funded, organized, and trained pro-U.S. groups in attempts to organize a military coup against the Iraqi government. In 1998 Congress passed the "Iraq Liberation Act" and gave nearly $100 million to anti-Hussein groups.
The U.S. imperialists claim that their continuing aggression against Iraq is aimed at preventing the spread of "weapons of mass destruction." This, too, is a ridiculous lie. The U.S. is the world leader in the manufacture, possession, and use of weapons of mass destruction. It has been spending $50 billion a year on its military forces in the Persian Gulf alone. At one point in 1998 the U.S. had two aircraft carriers, 400 aircraft, 24 ships, and 24,000 troops surrounding Iraq. The UN says it has destroyed several hundred tons of chemical weapons in Iraq--but the U.S. has over 31,000 tons of chemical weapons!
From the moment the U.S. began preparing a military assault on Iraq in summer of 1990, many people in the U.S. and around the world opposed it. Marches, demonstrations, teach-ins, and other forms of mass action against the war took place, including powerful demonstrations in the Middle East. Marchers shut down the Bay Bridge, a key transportation artery linking San Francisco and the East Bay.
Beginning with Jeff Paterson--the first GI to refuse to go to the Persian Gulf--2,000 active-duty soldiers and reservists refused to fight in the unjust war. Since 1991, opposition has continued to U.S. actions in the Persian Gulf. Many different organizations have spoken out against the deadly impact of the sanctions.
Groups of activists have defied the embargo by bringing supplies directly to Iraq. Protests and teach-ins against the ongoing U.S. war against the Iraqi people have never stopped. Last summer 1,000 activists and youth held a vigil outside the Democratic National Convention in L.A. to protest the sanctions and U.S. military attacks. Hatred of the U.S. has deepened and hardened throughout the Middle East as a result of the U.S. crimes against Iraq.
The U.S.'s war against Iraq is a war without any honor and justice--only shame and cowardice of a murderous bully. When the true history of this war is written, it will be among other infamous crimes: the U.S. cavalry massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890, the U.S.-backed massacre of peasants in El Salvador in 1932, the Nazi bombing of Guernica, Spain in 1937, the Japanese rape of Nanking in China in 1939, the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the U.S. massacre of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968....
U.S. crimes against Iraq have been carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations. In 1996, U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked, "Half a million Iraqi children have died--more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?" Albright's answer: "Yes, we think the price is worth it."
Now, as the new Bush administration prepares to take power, the old Gulf War criminals are being recycled into the highest positions of power. In 1991 Dubya's father, George Sr., was president. James Baker, Bush's no-recount pointman in Florida, was Secretary of State. Vice President Dick Cheney was the Secretary of Defense. Secretary-of-State-to-be Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So mass murder on behalf of imperialism is given the highest honors and rewards.
Yet one more reason to overthrow this rotten system and bury it forever!
By Larry Everest, posted on Revolutionary Worker Online rwor.org
By the time the war was over, they had dropped 88,000 tons of bombs, equivalent to over seven Hiroshimas.
I traveled to Iraq as an RW correspondent in June of 1991, some three months after the end of the Persian Gulf War. From Amman, Jordan, I went to Baghdad, Iraq's capital, and then south to Basra, near the war zone. I also briefly visited Iraqi Kurdistan to the north and east of Baghdad. Along the way I talked to as many people as I could--doctors, workers, housewives, business people, government officials.
I saw the devastation wrought by the war: bombed-out hospitals, apartment buildings, bridges, roads, water plants, and factories. And I learned of the Iraqi people's determination to survive the bombs and everything else the U.S. had thrown at them.
But almost ten years later, the thing I remember most clearly is the children--in hospital after hospital, in Baghdad and Basra and places in between. Children so thin from being sick and malnourished that it seemed they might break if held too tightly. Their mothers keeping a vigil by their bedsides, helpless to save them.
The horror of it all was that this wasn't the result of some unknown disease or a new scourge like AIDS. This slow, painful, heartbreaking death was from starvation and ordinary diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, pneumonia, and whooping cough which should be easily treatable. But the U.S. war machine had destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, making the delivery of safe, clean water impossible.
And the U.S. strangulation of Iraq meant it couldn't import needed foods, medicines, and equipment to prevent ordinary illness from turning into the nightmare of starvation and death.
Today, the scene hasn't changed all that much: children are still wasting in Iraq's hospitals and dying at the rate of some 4,500 a month because U.S. economic sanctions and U.S. military assaults continue against Iraq.
The U.S. war on Iraq was--and continues to be--a high-tech mass murder from a safe distance, directed mainly against the civilian population. There has not been one shred of right or justice in anything the U.S. has done to Iraq for the last ten years. Every justification the imperialists have uttered is a lie; every action they've taken a shameful crime.
When the bombing started ten years ago, the U.S. claimed it was striking with "surgical precision." But in reality, military targets weren't the only things hit; so were homes, apartment buildings, hospitals, bridges, factories, water and power plants, bomb shelters, and government offices. A direct missile hit on the Amiriya air raid shelter in Baghdad killed hundreds of civilians.
On February 22, 1991, the U.S. launched its 100-hour ground war. Heavily armed U.S. units drove deep into southern Iraq, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake. On February 26, the U.S. attacked Iraqi troops as they were trying to retreat north on the road from Kuwait to Basra; U.S. planes bombed both ends of the road, cutting off escape, then massacred the troops in between. The six-lane highway from Kuwait City to Basra was littered with burnt-out tanks, trucks, and bodies; it became known as the "highway of death."
U.S. massacres continued after the February 27 cease-fire. On March 2, the Army's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division killed thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers--including by firing into a crowd of 350 disarmed prisoners. The officer in charge--General Barry McCaffrey--later became the "drug czar" under President Clinton and a pointman for stepped-up U.S. intervention in Colombia.
The U.S. claimed there were 13,000 Iraqi casualties in the war; studies since the war put the real figure closer to 200,000.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the U.S. began a massive troop build-up in the name of "liberating Kuwait" and "protecting peace and democracy." But the Kuwaiti regime actually is a reactionary pro-Western kingdom. And the fact that the assault on Iraq continued long after this feudal dictatorship was restored exposed the true U.S. aims.
The U.S. imperialists' real objectives were to tighten their stranglehold on the Persian Gulf--where two-thirds of the world's oil reserves are located--and their domination of the Middle East, a critical political, geographic and military crossroads between Asia, Africa and Europe. Many other countries around the world depend on Gulf oil to fuel their economies. The military and strategic control of this region is crucial to the U.S.'s position as the world's top-dog imperialist power.
The Gulf War was about propping up the most loyal pro-U.S. regimes in the region, while punishing any forces, like Iraq, who might in any way challenge this setup. The war against Iraq was also aimed at strengthening Israel and forcing an unjust peace upon the Palestinian people.
And, in 1991, the U.S. also wanted to deliver a message--written in the blood of the Iraqi people--to the whole world: the Soviet Union had collapsed, and there was now a "new world order." The U.S. was Number 1--the globo-cop--and it would viciously assault any who dared stand in its way.
In the ten years since "Operation Desert Storm," much has been revealed about the enormous atrocities and war crimes committed by the U.S. and its allies during the Gulf War. The U.S. deliberately attacked Iraq's civilian infrastructure--knowing full well that this would mean the deaths of tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis.
The Sunday Herald of Scotland recently reported on a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document detailing how the U.S. planned to systematically destroy Iraq's water system by bombing dams and water and sewage facilities. Before the war 96% of Iraqis had access to clean drinking water; three years after the war only 45% did. Eight out of every ten instances of disease in Iraq today results from contaminated water. So the U.S. has been waging a form of germ warfare against the Iraqi people.
Over 500 tons of radioactive depleted uranium shells were fired at Iraqi forces. Upon impact, the uranium in these shells oxidizes into a fine mist which can be readily inhaled into the lungs and which contaminates food and water supplies. Iraqi doctors report that cancer rates are now four times higher than in 1991 and that this epidemic is killing thousands of Iraqis near the war zone, including children who weren't even born during the war. Depleted uranium is also thought to be a factor in the "Gulf War Syndrome" that afflicts many U.S. soldiers.
A cease-fire between the U.S.-led coalition and Iraq was declared on February 27, 1991. But the U.S. has continued the war on this oppressed country through sanctions, military strikes, and subversion. More people have been murdered after the war officially ended than while it was officially going on!
U.S. pressure has kept the economic sanctions in force. Iraq can only sell a portion of its oil (the country's main source of income) in exchange for food and is also banned from importing many needed goods, such as medicine. The sanctions are a devastating weapon of war on a country which is dependent on foreign sources for much of its food, medicine, and industrial technology.
In 1997 the UN reported that over 1.2 million Iraqis had died since the Gulf War as a result of medical shortages, including 750,000 children below the age of five. In 1999, UNICEF, a UN organization focusing on children, reported that Iraqi kids under five are dying at twice the rate they were before the sanctions began. Over one-quarter of Iraqis born since the Gulf War are underweight. Denis Halliday, a UN official who supervised the "oil for food" program in Iraq, quit his position because he said the U.S. and its allies were committing "genocide" against the Iraqi people.
After the cease-fire, the U.S. stole the skies over Iraq by declaring that large parts of north and south Iraq were "no-fly" zones for Iraqi aircraft. Over the last ten years, U.S. planes have flown over 280,000 sorties in Iraq. For much of 1998-99, U.S. and British planes struck Iraq every day, firing thousands of missiles. In the last two years, over 300 Iraqis have been killed in these bombings. This air war has barely been mentioned in the mainstream U.S. media.
The CIA has funded, organized, and trained pro-U.S. groups in attempts to organize a military coup against the Iraqi government. In 1998 Congress passed the "Iraq Liberation Act" and gave nearly $100 million to anti-Hussein groups.
The U.S. imperialists claim that their continuing aggression against Iraq is aimed at preventing the spread of "weapons of mass destruction." This, too, is a ridiculous lie. The U.S. is the world leader in the manufacture, possession, and use of weapons of mass destruction. It has been spending $50 billion a year on its military forces in the Persian Gulf alone. At one point in 1998 the U.S. had two aircraft carriers, 400 aircraft, 24 ships, and 24,000 troops surrounding Iraq. The UN says it has destroyed several hundred tons of chemical weapons in Iraq--but the U.S. has over 31,000 tons of chemical weapons!
From the moment the U.S. began preparing a military assault on Iraq in summer of 1990, many people in the U.S. and around the world opposed it. Marches, demonstrations, teach-ins, and other forms of mass action against the war took place, including powerful demonstrations in the Middle East. Marchers shut down the Bay Bridge, a key transportation artery linking San Francisco and the East Bay.
Beginning with Jeff Paterson--the first GI to refuse to go to the Persian Gulf--2,000 active-duty soldiers and reservists refused to fight in the unjust war. Since 1991, opposition has continued to U.S. actions in the Persian Gulf. Many different organizations have spoken out against the deadly impact of the sanctions.
Groups of activists have defied the embargo by bringing supplies directly to Iraq. Protests and teach-ins against the ongoing U.S. war against the Iraqi people have never stopped. Last summer 1,000 activists and youth held a vigil outside the Democratic National Convention in L.A. to protest the sanctions and U.S. military attacks. Hatred of the U.S. has deepened and hardened throughout the Middle East as a result of the U.S. crimes against Iraq.
The U.S.'s war against Iraq is a war without any honor and justice--only shame and cowardice of a murderous bully. When the true history of this war is written, it will be among other infamous crimes: the U.S. cavalry massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890, the U.S.-backed massacre of peasants in El Salvador in 1932, the Nazi bombing of Guernica, Spain in 1937, the Japanese rape of Nanking in China in 1939, the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the U.S. massacre of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968....
U.S. crimes against Iraq have been carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations. In 1996, U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked, "Half a million Iraqi children have died--more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?" Albright's answer: "Yes, we think the price is worth it."
Now, as the new Bush administration prepares to take power, the old Gulf War criminals are being recycled into the highest positions of power. In 1991 Dubya's father, George Sr., was president. James Baker, Bush's no-recount pointman in Florida, was Secretary of State. Vice President Dick Cheney was the Secretary of Defense. Secretary-of-State-to-be Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So mass murder on behalf of imperialism is given the highest honors and rewards.
Yet one more reason to overthrow this rotten system and bury it forever!
By Larry Everest, posted on Revolutionary Worker Online rwor.org
The United States, CIA, Saddam and the Baath party´s Iraqi coup. Ali Saleh Sa'adi: "We came to power on a CIA train."
In early 1963, on February 8, a military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the United States.
He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil.
In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. "We really had the ts crossed on what was happening," James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. "We regarded it as a great victory." Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. "We came to power on a CIA train," admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror.
CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers.
The Ba'athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz al-Khas, the clandestine Ba'athist Intelligence organisation. As such, he was soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam's rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!
1963: Qasim's government is overthrown in a coup bringing the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party to power. They favour the joining together of Iraq, Egypt and Syria in one Arab nation. In the same year, the Ba'ath also come to power in Syria, although the Syrian and Iraqi parties subsequently split.
The Ba'ath strengthen links with the U.S. During the coup, demonstrators are mown down by tanks, initiating a period of ruthless persecution. Up to 10,000 people are imprisoned, many are tortured. The CIA supply intelligence to the Ba'athists on communists and radicals to be rounded up. In addition to the 149 officially executed, about 5,000 are killed in the terror, many buried alive in mass graves. The new government continues the war on the Kurds, bombarding them with tanks, artillery and from the air, and bulldozing villages.
Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New evidence just published reveals that the agency not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured - a monstrous stratagem that led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.
The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by the agency, but it was the bloodiest - far bloodier than the coup it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power. Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs.
The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup.
The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of 600 of them - including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.
The lists were compiled in CIA stations throughout the Middle East with the assistance of Iraqi exiles like Saddam, who was based in Egypt. An Egyptian intelligence officer, who obtained a good deal of his information from Saddam, helped the Cairo CIA station draw up its list. According to Aburish, however, the American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time magazine.
The butchery began as soon as the lists reached Baghdad. No-one was spared. Even pregnant women and elderly men were killed. Some were tortured in front of their children. According to the author, Saddam who 'had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors, was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.'
King Hussain of Jordan, who maintained close links with the CIA, says the death lists were relayed by radio to Baghdad from Kuwait, the foreign base for the Iraqi coup. According to him, a secret radio broadcast was made from Kuwait on the day of the coup, February 8, 'that relayed to those carrying out the coup the names and addresses of communists there, so they could be seized and executed.'
The CIA's royal collaborator also gives an insight into how closely the Ba'athist party and American intelligence operators worked together during the planning stages. 'Many meetings were held between the Ba'ath party and American intelligence - the most critical ones in Kuwait,' he says.
At the time the Ba'ath party was a small nationalist movement with only 850 members. But the CIA decided to use it because of its close relations with the army. One of its members tried to assassinate Kassim as early as 1959. Saddam, then 22, was wounded in the leg, later fleeing the country.
According to Aburish, the Ba'ath party leaders - in return for CIA support - agreed to 'undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies.' Hani Fkaiki, a Ba'ath party leader, says that the party's contact man who orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.
One of the coup leaders, colonel Saleh Mahdi Ammash, former Iraqi assistant military attache in Washington, was in fact arrested for being in touch with Lakeland in Baghdad. His arrest caused the conspirators to move earlier than they had planned.
Aburish's book shows that the Ba'ath leaders did not deny plotting with the CIA ro overthrow Kassim. When Syrian Ba'ath party officials demanded to know why they were in cahoots with the US agency, the Iraqis tried to justify it in terms of ideology comparing their collusion to 'Lenin arriving in a German train to carry out his revolution.' Ali Saleh, the minister of interior of the regime which had replaced Kassim, said: 'We came to power on a CIA train.'
It should not come as a surprise that the Americans were so eager to overthrow Kassim or so willing to cause such a blood bath to achieve their objective. At the height of the cold war, they were causing similar mayhem in Latin America and Indo-China overthrowing any leaders that dared show the slighest degree of independence.
Kassim was a prime target for US aggression and arrogance. After taking power in 1958, he took Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact, the US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, and in 1961 he dared nationalise part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company and resurrected a long-standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait ( the regime which succeeded him immediately dropped the claim to Kuwait).
But the cold war does not by itself explain Uncle Sam's propensity to violence. When president George Bush bombed Iraq to smithereens, killing thousands of civilians, the cold war was over. Clinton cannot cite the cold war for insisting that the brutal regime of sanctions imposed on the country should stay.
In fact the brutal, blood-stained nature of Uncle Sam goes back all the way to the so-called 'Founding Fathers,' who made no attempt to conceal it. As long ago as 1818, John Quincy Adams hailed the 'salutary efficacy' of terror in dealing with 'mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes.' He was defending Andrew Jackson's frenzied operations in Florida which virtually wiped out the indigenous population and left the Spanish province under US control. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were not above professing to be impressed by the wisdom of his words.
The CIA has been meddling in Iraq with disastrous consequences for over four decades. After propping up the corrupt Nuri Said, the USA went after Abdul-Karim Kassem, whose popularly-supported coup eliminated the old British agent Nuri in 1958.
Among those whom the CIA recruited to do its dirty work were the Iraqi Baath Party, including a brash power-hungry adventurer named Saddam Hussein. Saddam actually engaged in an attempt on Kassem's life, one of many engineered by CIA "assets." The Baath did finally succeed in overthrowing and killing Kassem in 1963.
The CIA gave the emergent Baath a long list of Communists and others to liquidate, which they undertook to accomplish with their usual thoroughness, Husayn Al-Kurdi , Source: "The CIA In Kurdistan", and December 1996
Kassem had helped found the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in an attempt to curtail Western control of Arab oil. He had been planning to nationalise the Iraq Petroleum Company in which the USA had an interest.
Iraq had also disapproved when Kuwait had been given independence by the UK with a pro-west emir (king) and oil concessions to Western companies. A few days before the coup, the French newspaper La Monde had reported that Kassem had been warned by the USA government to change his country's economic policies or face sanctions.
British government papers later declassified would indicate that the coup was backed by the USA and UK. The new government promises not to nationalise American oil interests and renounces its claim to Kuwait. The USA recognises and praises the new government.
A history of twists and turns, with the CIA often as a blunt axe, have made it very difficult for the United States to be seen as a reliable, or even honest, presence in the Middle East. The resentment is not confined to Arabs. Nine years ago, Massoud Barzani, who has rarely ever traveled away from Kurdistan, agreed to visit Washington with a deputation of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC).
Massoud, used to the traditional baggy trousers and cummerbund, looked uncomfortable in an Armani suit at receptions, but the INC was keen to create the right impression with senators and opinion-formers. Nonetheless, Massoud refused an invitation to visit Henry Kissinger.
Despite all the compromises of Kurdish politics, Massoud had never forgiven the former secretary of state for engineering the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran, when the two sides suddenly settled long-standing differences and felt free to deal with their "internal problems," including the Kurds. Algiers came just two years after Massoud went to Washington to meet Richard Helms, the CIA director, and Al Haig, the White House chief of staff a meeting that led to both CIA and Israeli advisers moving into northern Iraq to help the Kurds.
Algiers left the Kurds high and dry, ending a generation of Kurdish revolt led by Massoud's father, Mulla Mustafa, whose broken heart sent him into exile and an early death. Even if those in Washington forgot quickly, Massoud did not.
The relationship between the CIA and Saddam Hussein is a long one. In 1963, the Americans plotted with the Ba'ath against Abdel Karim Kassem, a man who, in the words of the writer Said Aburish, "retains more of the affection of the Iraqi people than any leader this century." The CIA supplied lists for the Ba'ath to kill leftists and communists, and Washington flew arms to Kirkuk to use against the Kurds.
In Aburish's biography of the Iraqi leader, the author quotes many anti-Saddam Iraqis including Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the INC on CIA cooperation with the second Ba'ath coup in 1968. Later, in the 1980s, the United States and Britain helped arm Saddam in his confrontation with Iran only to turn against him over the 1990 Kuwait crisis.
When in 1991 the Iraqi people rose against Saddam, the United States was fearful that change would put its majority Shi'ites and thus Iran in power, and US forces stood by as the Republican Guard crushed the rebellion. The CIA then worked on sponsoring a coup in Baghdad, a strategy that crumbled in 1996 when Iraqi intelligence infiltrated a conspiracy led by the ex-Ba'athist Iyad Alawi. Having rounded up hundreds of officers, the mukhabarat sent a message to the CIA team in Amman: "We have arrested all your people. You might as well pack up and go home."
The CIA's half-hearted support for the INC also ended in 1996, when Saddam exploited Kurdish in-fighting to crush an INC presence in the Kurdish-controlled zone in the north. As Iraqi tanks moved in, the CIA fled and left the INC people to their fate. Washington washed its hands of the affair, and Chalabi noted that CIA officials "are not known for their veracity."
In 1963, Saddam Hussein worked with the CIA to carry out the coup by the Baath party, which eventually brought him to power in Iraq. The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite by Said K. Aburish, which was reviewed recently in Counterpunch ("The CIA: Lest We Forget", CounterPunch. Sept.16-30 1997, p.2), describes how the CIA, Saddam and other members of the Baath party collaborated to bring about the coup, murdering perhaps 5,000 people in the process.
The United States went on to help Saddam win the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. According to Noam Chomsky, "There were no passionate calls for a military strike after Saddam's gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March, 1988; on the contrary, the US and U.K. extended their strong support for the mass murderer, then, also 'our kind of guy'" ("Iraq and the UN Sanctions", The Economist, Nov.19 1994, p.47)
America aided Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party into power in Iraq. Describing them as "...the political force of the future..." the CIA met with Ba'ath activists in the early 1960's. In the coup of 1963, thousands of Iraqi opposition political figures were murdered in three days, many them on a list which, according to journalist John Pilger, was supplied by the CIA. James Critchfield was the head of the CIA's Middle East Desk at the time.
He later described the coup to authors Andrew and Patrick Cockburn for their book 'Out of the Ashes.' "It was a great victory...It was an operation where all the 't's were really crossed." Another CIA agent testified to Congress: "He [Saddam] was a son of a bitch, but he was OUR son of a bitch." ['PAYING THE PRICE' - documentary by John Pilger, CARLTON TV, UK, 1999]
It is astonishing how many tough-minded men in American government have been convinced by the regular spiel that the CIA has a deeprooted antipathy to proposals for political murder. A witness to still another episode of the sort was Armin Meyer, a career diplomat with a long history in the Near East going back to the Office of War Information, a kind of offshoot of the OSS, during World War II.
In July 1958, when the government of Iraq was overthrown in a coup notable for its violence, Meyer was deputy director of the State Department's Office of Near Eastern Affairs. The following year he was promoted to director and as such was called in whenever the CIA contemplated covert operations in Iraq.
The new ruler of the country was an army general named Abdul Karim Kassem, who had murdered his predecessors as well as a number of foreigners who happened to be in Baghdad at the time of his coup. On top of that, he immediately restored diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, later lifted a ban on the Iraqi Communist party while suppressing pro-Western parties, and in many other ways invited the hostility of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles.
On one occasion during Armin Meyer's tenure as director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, he attended a meeting in Allen Dulles's office at the CIA to discuss how the United States might remove Kassem. Meyer had attended many such meetings; they were a routine of government; but this one stuck in his mind.
During the meeting one of those present suggested that Kassem was the problem, and maybe the best way to get rid of him was to get rid of him. Wait a minute, Dulles said. An awful silence followed. Dulles was a man of great personal authority, and his words on this occasion had a cold and deliberate emphasis which Meyer never forgot. Dulles wanted one thing to be understood: it is not in the American character to assassinate opponents; murder was not to be discussed in his office, now or ever again; he did not ever want to hear another such suggestion by a servant of the United States government; that is not the way Americans do things.
Dulles was so clear on this point, and spoke with such evident passion and conviction, that Meyer simply could not understand how Dulles ever could have been party to an assassination plot no matter who gave the orders. Meyer knew what was in the Church Committee's reports, but he simply did not believe it, there must be some error, it was beyond Meyer's capacity to conceive that he could have been mistaken on this point, Dulles had left no room for doubt: he would not be a party to assassination.
The message to McNamara, and to us, ought to be loud and clear: assassination was too sensitive a matter to be discussed in official meetings or to be recorded in official memos and minutes. What those high officials who received the regular spiel failed to comprehend was the degree of secrecy which surrounded any matter as explosive as assassination. Armin Meyer, for example, was convinced by Dulles's version of the regular spiel that he would never be a party to assassination.
He knew what was in the Church Committee's Assassination Report roughly knew, that is; he had not actually read itbut he couldn't square what he'd heard with what he thought he knew. If he had read the report, the whole report, and most particularly the long footnote on page 181, he would have known that Dulles's solemn disapproval was in truth nothing more than the regular spiel.
In February 1960, while the government was trying to decide what to do about General Kassem, the chief of the DDP's Near East Division proposed that Kassem be "incapacitated" with a poisoned handkerchief prepared by the DDP's Technical Services Division.
In April the proposal was supported by the DDP's Chief of Operations, Richard Helms, who endorsed Kassem's incapacitation as "highly desirable." Meyer would further have known that Bisseil did not act in such matters without Dulles's approval, and that Bissell was convinced he could hardly have made this point any clearer to the Church Committee that Dulles would not have proceeded without an order from the only man with the authority to okay an attempt on a foreign leader's life.
In this instance the handkerchief was duly dispatched to Kassem, but whether or not it ever reached him, it certainly did not kill him. His own countrymen did that on February 8, 1963, by executing him before a firing squad on live television in Baghdad.
What Livingston Merchant, Armin Meyer, Robert McNamara, and others failed to understand was that official meetings in the office of the Director of the CIA, or of the Secretary of State, or of the Special Group, were hardly the place to discuss something that was really secret.
From the CIA's point of view the Secretary of State's office was about as secure as the floor of Congress with a full press gallery. It you were going to plan an assassination in the Secretary of State's office, or record the discussion in the minutes, you might as well send a press release to the New York Times. Eisenhower and Kennedy went after two enemies in particular in the years between 1959 and 1963 Lumumba in the Congo and Castro in Cuba but when they gave the job to the CIA they expected secrecy, and that is what they got.
Sources:
1963: U.S. supports coup by Iraqi Ba'ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam Hussein) and reportedly gives them names of communists to murder, which they do with vigor.
Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, New York: Harperperennial. 1999, p. 74;
Edith and E. F. Penrose, Iraq: International Relations and National Development, Boulder: Westview, 1978, p. 288;
Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978, pp. 985-86
Source: Stephen R. Shalom Middle East Time Line (revised, 12 Dec. 2001) http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pfvs/2001IV/msg01736.html
Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, excerpt from Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, 2000. Cited by Tim Buckley.
"Fear And Loathing Of The US Government" http://www.firethistime.org/fearusgovt.htm
Alfred Mendes, Excerpt from "Blood for Oil," http://www.spectrezine.org/war/Mendes.htm
From Practical History, London, May 2000. http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7672/iraq.html
Muslimedia: August 16-31, 1997 http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/features98/saddam.htm
Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi, "The Acts of the Democracies: 1960 to 1964" http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_1960to1964.html
Gareth Smyth, "In the Middle East, the CIA has hurt its friends and helped its own enemies."http://www.mafhoum.com/press2/cia276_files/home_files/azpolitics_03.htm
Ruth Wilson, "American Policy in Iraq" http://www.speakeasy.org/wfp/37/american.html
Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, 1979, pp. 160-164.
Richard Sanders, Coordinator, Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade and editor, of COAT's quarterly magazine "Press for Conversion!.
Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) (A network of individuals and NGOs across Canada and around the world) Email: ad207@ncf.ca Web: http://www.ncf.ca/coat
Copyright Richard Sanders 2002. For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement .
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SAN210A.html
He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil.
In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. "We really had the ts crossed on what was happening," James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. "We regarded it as a great victory." Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. "We came to power on a CIA train," admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror.
CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers.
The Ba'athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz al-Khas, the clandestine Ba'athist Intelligence organisation. As such, he was soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam's rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!
1963: Qasim's government is overthrown in a coup bringing the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party to power. They favour the joining together of Iraq, Egypt and Syria in one Arab nation. In the same year, the Ba'ath also come to power in Syria, although the Syrian and Iraqi parties subsequently split.
The Ba'ath strengthen links with the U.S. During the coup, demonstrators are mown down by tanks, initiating a period of ruthless persecution. Up to 10,000 people are imprisoned, many are tortured. The CIA supply intelligence to the Ba'athists on communists and radicals to be rounded up. In addition to the 149 officially executed, about 5,000 are killed in the terror, many buried alive in mass graves. The new government continues the war on the Kurds, bombarding them with tanks, artillery and from the air, and bulldozing villages.
Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New evidence just published reveals that the agency not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured - a monstrous stratagem that led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.
The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by the agency, but it was the bloodiest - far bloodier than the coup it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power. Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs.
The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup.
The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of 600 of them - including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.
The lists were compiled in CIA stations throughout the Middle East with the assistance of Iraqi exiles like Saddam, who was based in Egypt. An Egyptian intelligence officer, who obtained a good deal of his information from Saddam, helped the Cairo CIA station draw up its list. According to Aburish, however, the American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time magazine.
The butchery began as soon as the lists reached Baghdad. No-one was spared. Even pregnant women and elderly men were killed. Some were tortured in front of their children. According to the author, Saddam who 'had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors, was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.'
King Hussain of Jordan, who maintained close links with the CIA, says the death lists were relayed by radio to Baghdad from Kuwait, the foreign base for the Iraqi coup. According to him, a secret radio broadcast was made from Kuwait on the day of the coup, February 8, 'that relayed to those carrying out the coup the names and addresses of communists there, so they could be seized and executed.'
The CIA's royal collaborator also gives an insight into how closely the Ba'athist party and American intelligence operators worked together during the planning stages. 'Many meetings were held between the Ba'ath party and American intelligence - the most critical ones in Kuwait,' he says.
At the time the Ba'ath party was a small nationalist movement with only 850 members. But the CIA decided to use it because of its close relations with the army. One of its members tried to assassinate Kassim as early as 1959. Saddam, then 22, was wounded in the leg, later fleeing the country.
According to Aburish, the Ba'ath party leaders - in return for CIA support - agreed to 'undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies.' Hani Fkaiki, a Ba'ath party leader, says that the party's contact man who orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.
One of the coup leaders, colonel Saleh Mahdi Ammash, former Iraqi assistant military attache in Washington, was in fact arrested for being in touch with Lakeland in Baghdad. His arrest caused the conspirators to move earlier than they had planned.
Aburish's book shows that the Ba'ath leaders did not deny plotting with the CIA ro overthrow Kassim. When Syrian Ba'ath party officials demanded to know why they were in cahoots with the US agency, the Iraqis tried to justify it in terms of ideology comparing their collusion to 'Lenin arriving in a German train to carry out his revolution.' Ali Saleh, the minister of interior of the regime which had replaced Kassim, said: 'We came to power on a CIA train.'
It should not come as a surprise that the Americans were so eager to overthrow Kassim or so willing to cause such a blood bath to achieve their objective. At the height of the cold war, they were causing similar mayhem in Latin America and Indo-China overthrowing any leaders that dared show the slighest degree of independence.
Kassim was a prime target for US aggression and arrogance. After taking power in 1958, he took Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact, the US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, and in 1961 he dared nationalise part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company and resurrected a long-standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait ( the regime which succeeded him immediately dropped the claim to Kuwait).
But the cold war does not by itself explain Uncle Sam's propensity to violence. When president George Bush bombed Iraq to smithereens, killing thousands of civilians, the cold war was over. Clinton cannot cite the cold war for insisting that the brutal regime of sanctions imposed on the country should stay.
In fact the brutal, blood-stained nature of Uncle Sam goes back all the way to the so-called 'Founding Fathers,' who made no attempt to conceal it. As long ago as 1818, John Quincy Adams hailed the 'salutary efficacy' of terror in dealing with 'mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes.' He was defending Andrew Jackson's frenzied operations in Florida which virtually wiped out the indigenous population and left the Spanish province under US control. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were not above professing to be impressed by the wisdom of his words.
The CIA has been meddling in Iraq with disastrous consequences for over four decades. After propping up the corrupt Nuri Said, the USA went after Abdul-Karim Kassem, whose popularly-supported coup eliminated the old British agent Nuri in 1958.
Among those whom the CIA recruited to do its dirty work were the Iraqi Baath Party, including a brash power-hungry adventurer named Saddam Hussein. Saddam actually engaged in an attempt on Kassem's life, one of many engineered by CIA "assets." The Baath did finally succeed in overthrowing and killing Kassem in 1963.
The CIA gave the emergent Baath a long list of Communists and others to liquidate, which they undertook to accomplish with their usual thoroughness, Husayn Al-Kurdi , Source: "The CIA In Kurdistan", and December 1996
Kassem had helped found the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in an attempt to curtail Western control of Arab oil. He had been planning to nationalise the Iraq Petroleum Company in which the USA had an interest.
Iraq had also disapproved when Kuwait had been given independence by the UK with a pro-west emir (king) and oil concessions to Western companies. A few days before the coup, the French newspaper La Monde had reported that Kassem had been warned by the USA government to change his country's economic policies or face sanctions.
British government papers later declassified would indicate that the coup was backed by the USA and UK. The new government promises not to nationalise American oil interests and renounces its claim to Kuwait. The USA recognises and praises the new government.
A history of twists and turns, with the CIA often as a blunt axe, have made it very difficult for the United States to be seen as a reliable, or even honest, presence in the Middle East. The resentment is not confined to Arabs. Nine years ago, Massoud Barzani, who has rarely ever traveled away from Kurdistan, agreed to visit Washington with a deputation of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC).
Massoud, used to the traditional baggy trousers and cummerbund, looked uncomfortable in an Armani suit at receptions, but the INC was keen to create the right impression with senators and opinion-formers. Nonetheless, Massoud refused an invitation to visit Henry Kissinger.
Despite all the compromises of Kurdish politics, Massoud had never forgiven the former secretary of state for engineering the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran, when the two sides suddenly settled long-standing differences and felt free to deal with their "internal problems," including the Kurds. Algiers came just two years after Massoud went to Washington to meet Richard Helms, the CIA director, and Al Haig, the White House chief of staff a meeting that led to both CIA and Israeli advisers moving into northern Iraq to help the Kurds.
Algiers left the Kurds high and dry, ending a generation of Kurdish revolt led by Massoud's father, Mulla Mustafa, whose broken heart sent him into exile and an early death. Even if those in Washington forgot quickly, Massoud did not.
The relationship between the CIA and Saddam Hussein is a long one. In 1963, the Americans plotted with the Ba'ath against Abdel Karim Kassem, a man who, in the words of the writer Said Aburish, "retains more of the affection of the Iraqi people than any leader this century." The CIA supplied lists for the Ba'ath to kill leftists and communists, and Washington flew arms to Kirkuk to use against the Kurds.
In Aburish's biography of the Iraqi leader, the author quotes many anti-Saddam Iraqis including Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the INC on CIA cooperation with the second Ba'ath coup in 1968. Later, in the 1980s, the United States and Britain helped arm Saddam in his confrontation with Iran only to turn against him over the 1990 Kuwait crisis.
When in 1991 the Iraqi people rose against Saddam, the United States was fearful that change would put its majority Shi'ites and thus Iran in power, and US forces stood by as the Republican Guard crushed the rebellion. The CIA then worked on sponsoring a coup in Baghdad, a strategy that crumbled in 1996 when Iraqi intelligence infiltrated a conspiracy led by the ex-Ba'athist Iyad Alawi. Having rounded up hundreds of officers, the mukhabarat sent a message to the CIA team in Amman: "We have arrested all your people. You might as well pack up and go home."
The CIA's half-hearted support for the INC also ended in 1996, when Saddam exploited Kurdish in-fighting to crush an INC presence in the Kurdish-controlled zone in the north. As Iraqi tanks moved in, the CIA fled and left the INC people to their fate. Washington washed its hands of the affair, and Chalabi noted that CIA officials "are not known for their veracity."
In 1963, Saddam Hussein worked with the CIA to carry out the coup by the Baath party, which eventually brought him to power in Iraq. The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite by Said K. Aburish, which was reviewed recently in Counterpunch ("The CIA: Lest We Forget", CounterPunch. Sept.16-30 1997, p.2), describes how the CIA, Saddam and other members of the Baath party collaborated to bring about the coup, murdering perhaps 5,000 people in the process.
The United States went on to help Saddam win the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. According to Noam Chomsky, "There were no passionate calls for a military strike after Saddam's gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March, 1988; on the contrary, the US and U.K. extended their strong support for the mass murderer, then, also 'our kind of guy'" ("Iraq and the UN Sanctions", The Economist, Nov.19 1994, p.47)
America aided Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party into power in Iraq. Describing them as "...the political force of the future..." the CIA met with Ba'ath activists in the early 1960's. In the coup of 1963, thousands of Iraqi opposition political figures were murdered in three days, many them on a list which, according to journalist John Pilger, was supplied by the CIA. James Critchfield was the head of the CIA's Middle East Desk at the time.
He later described the coup to authors Andrew and Patrick Cockburn for their book 'Out of the Ashes.' "It was a great victory...It was an operation where all the 't's were really crossed." Another CIA agent testified to Congress: "He [Saddam] was a son of a bitch, but he was OUR son of a bitch." ['PAYING THE PRICE' - documentary by John Pilger, CARLTON TV, UK, 1999]
It is astonishing how many tough-minded men in American government have been convinced by the regular spiel that the CIA has a deeprooted antipathy to proposals for political murder. A witness to still another episode of the sort was Armin Meyer, a career diplomat with a long history in the Near East going back to the Office of War Information, a kind of offshoot of the OSS, during World War II.
In July 1958, when the government of Iraq was overthrown in a coup notable for its violence, Meyer was deputy director of the State Department's Office of Near Eastern Affairs. The following year he was promoted to director and as such was called in whenever the CIA contemplated covert operations in Iraq.
The new ruler of the country was an army general named Abdul Karim Kassem, who had murdered his predecessors as well as a number of foreigners who happened to be in Baghdad at the time of his coup. On top of that, he immediately restored diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, later lifted a ban on the Iraqi Communist party while suppressing pro-Western parties, and in many other ways invited the hostility of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles.
On one occasion during Armin Meyer's tenure as director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, he attended a meeting in Allen Dulles's office at the CIA to discuss how the United States might remove Kassem. Meyer had attended many such meetings; they were a routine of government; but this one stuck in his mind.
During the meeting one of those present suggested that Kassem was the problem, and maybe the best way to get rid of him was to get rid of him. Wait a minute, Dulles said. An awful silence followed. Dulles was a man of great personal authority, and his words on this occasion had a cold and deliberate emphasis which Meyer never forgot. Dulles wanted one thing to be understood: it is not in the American character to assassinate opponents; murder was not to be discussed in his office, now or ever again; he did not ever want to hear another such suggestion by a servant of the United States government; that is not the way Americans do things.
Dulles was so clear on this point, and spoke with such evident passion and conviction, that Meyer simply could not understand how Dulles ever could have been party to an assassination plot no matter who gave the orders. Meyer knew what was in the Church Committee's reports, but he simply did not believe it, there must be some error, it was beyond Meyer's capacity to conceive that he could have been mistaken on this point, Dulles had left no room for doubt: he would not be a party to assassination.
The message to McNamara, and to us, ought to be loud and clear: assassination was too sensitive a matter to be discussed in official meetings or to be recorded in official memos and minutes. What those high officials who received the regular spiel failed to comprehend was the degree of secrecy which surrounded any matter as explosive as assassination. Armin Meyer, for example, was convinced by Dulles's version of the regular spiel that he would never be a party to assassination.
He knew what was in the Church Committee's Assassination Report roughly knew, that is; he had not actually read itbut he couldn't square what he'd heard with what he thought he knew. If he had read the report, the whole report, and most particularly the long footnote on page 181, he would have known that Dulles's solemn disapproval was in truth nothing more than the regular spiel.
In February 1960, while the government was trying to decide what to do about General Kassem, the chief of the DDP's Near East Division proposed that Kassem be "incapacitated" with a poisoned handkerchief prepared by the DDP's Technical Services Division.
In April the proposal was supported by the DDP's Chief of Operations, Richard Helms, who endorsed Kassem's incapacitation as "highly desirable." Meyer would further have known that Bisseil did not act in such matters without Dulles's approval, and that Bissell was convinced he could hardly have made this point any clearer to the Church Committee that Dulles would not have proceeded without an order from the only man with the authority to okay an attempt on a foreign leader's life.
In this instance the handkerchief was duly dispatched to Kassem, but whether or not it ever reached him, it certainly did not kill him. His own countrymen did that on February 8, 1963, by executing him before a firing squad on live television in Baghdad.
What Livingston Merchant, Armin Meyer, Robert McNamara, and others failed to understand was that official meetings in the office of the Director of the CIA, or of the Secretary of State, or of the Special Group, were hardly the place to discuss something that was really secret.
From the CIA's point of view the Secretary of State's office was about as secure as the floor of Congress with a full press gallery. It you were going to plan an assassination in the Secretary of State's office, or record the discussion in the minutes, you might as well send a press release to the New York Times. Eisenhower and Kennedy went after two enemies in particular in the years between 1959 and 1963 Lumumba in the Congo and Castro in Cuba but when they gave the job to the CIA they expected secrecy, and that is what they got.
Sources:
1963: U.S. supports coup by Iraqi Ba'ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam Hussein) and reportedly gives them names of communists to murder, which they do with vigor.
Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, New York: Harperperennial. 1999, p. 74;
Edith and E. F. Penrose, Iraq: International Relations and National Development, Boulder: Westview, 1978, p. 288;
Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978, pp. 985-86
Source: Stephen R. Shalom Middle East Time Line (revised, 12 Dec. 2001) http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pfvs/2001IV/msg01736.html
Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, excerpt from Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, 2000. Cited by Tim Buckley.
"Fear And Loathing Of The US Government" http://www.firethistime.org/fearusgovt.htm
Alfred Mendes, Excerpt from "Blood for Oil," http://www.spectrezine.org/war/Mendes.htm
From Practical History, London, May 2000. http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7672/iraq.html
Muslimedia: August 16-31, 1997 http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/features98/saddam.htm
Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi, "The Acts of the Democracies: 1960 to 1964" http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_1960to1964.html
Gareth Smyth, "In the Middle East, the CIA has hurt its friends and helped its own enemies."http://www.mafhoum.com/press2/cia276_files/home_files/azpolitics_03.htm
Ruth Wilson, "American Policy in Iraq" http://www.speakeasy.org/wfp/37/american.html
Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, 1979, pp. 160-164.
Richard Sanders, Coordinator, Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade and editor, of COAT's quarterly magazine "Press for Conversion!.
Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) (A network of individuals and NGOs across Canada and around the world) Email: ad207@ncf.ca Web: http://www.ncf.ca/coat
Copyright Richard Sanders 2002. For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement .
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SAN210A.html
"Friends of Syria" meeting in Istanbul, attack by Turkish warplanes in the Kandil area, IOF soldiers open machinegun fire
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged support for Syrians’ right to self-defense if there is UN inaction, AFP reported.
Dozens of representatives from Western and Arab countries were gathering for talks Sunday in Istanbul aimed at pressuring Damascus to implement a peace plan by Kofi Annan to stop bloodshed in Syria, aimed at turning up the pressure on Syria's regime to end a deadly crackdown on opponents.
Clashes in eastern Syria killed 10 people on Sunday, AFP quoted monitors as saying. The Local Coordination Committees in Syria: The number of martyrs in Syria today has risen to 30 thus far.
The Arab League called on UN to take binding measures against Syria, AFP reported on Sunday.
A young man was killed on Sunday in a raid carried out by Syrian security forces in the town of Dmeir, in Damascus province, where four other people were detained, monitors said.
Calling for tighter sanctions and for ways to hold Syrian leaders to account for abuses, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prepared for international talks in Turkey on Sunday aimed at turning up the heat on Syria to end a deadly crackdown on protests.
http://nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=253828
http://www.facebook.com/ShaamNewsNetwork
Turkey: 17 political prisoners transferred because prison is overcrowded.
26 March 2012, Bakirköy L Type prison authorities decided for the transfer of 17 political prisoners on the grounds that the prison is overcrowded. The prison administration however avoided touching more than 350 ordinary prisoners held in the prison.
Six woman prisoners sentenced for PKK and DHKP-C cases were transferred to Gebze M Type Prison on 11 March as 11 others are expecting to be exiled from the prison.
Among the woman prisoners transferred to Gebze Prison are also Emine Kaçar, mother of one, and DHKP-C case prisoner Münever Asçi who was one of the victims of 19 December slaughter of the so called Back to Life Operation in the year 2000.
Not only the transfer of Kaçar and Asçi, but also the way of their criminal conviction obviously reveals the arbitrariness of the “justice” system in Turkey.
Emine Kaçar was taken into custody on 13 November 1999 while touring around with her brother and friends, on charges of “going to mountain to join guerrilla”. After being subjected to torture for seven days at a police station, Emine was sent to jail on the basis of the slander by police. Emine, despite being released in 2000, was once more arrested one year later on the basis of the same court file. This time, she was released after spending four months in jail. However, in 2003, Emine was this time arrested with her brother and held in prison until her release in 2004 in accordance with a new legal arrangement made.
Still, nothing changed even after Emine, who got married in 2006, gave her baby the name Özgür (free) as a reaction to the usurpation of her freedom in an arbitrary manner. After being arrested for three times on the basis of the same court file, Emine Kaçar was this time found guilty of membership to the organization, which made her son Özgür one of the “jailed” children in Turkey.
Münever Asçi was in Bayrampasa prison when the state carried out operations in 20 separate prisons within the scope of Back to Life Operation. During the assault by special operation teams of Ankara Gendarme Command of Public Security, the left side of Münever’s face was burnt when she was trying to protect her woman comrades who were slaughtered with chemicals dropped on C Block of the prison. 12 prisoners were shot dead or died burning in this operation.
As the main individual responsible for the operation were once again absolved from the case, 39 soldiers who didn’t take part in the operation were taken to court for the operation. On the other hand, Münever Asçi who had been tried for the same case since 1991 was sent to Bakirköy L Type Prison to complete her sentence. And now, with Emine Kaçar, she has been arbitrarily transferred to Gebze M Type prison.
Dozens of representatives from Western and Arab countries were gathering for talks Sunday in Istanbul aimed at pressuring Damascus to implement a peace plan by Kofi Annan to stop bloodshed in Syria, aimed at turning up the pressure on Syria's regime to end a deadly crackdown on opponents.
Clashes in eastern Syria killed 10 people on Sunday, AFP quoted monitors as saying. The Local Coordination Committees in Syria: The number of martyrs in Syria today has risen to 30 thus far.
The Arab League called on UN to take binding measures against Syria, AFP reported on Sunday.
A young man was killed on Sunday in a raid carried out by Syrian security forces in the town of Dmeir, in Damascus province, where four other people were detained, monitors said.
Calling for tighter sanctions and for ways to hold Syrian leaders to account for abuses, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prepared for international talks in Turkey on Sunday aimed at turning up the heat on Syria to end a deadly crackdown on protests.
http://nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=253828
http://www.facebook.com/ShaamNewsNetwork
Turkey: 17 political prisoners transferred because prison is overcrowded.
26 March 2012, Bakirköy L Type prison authorities decided for the transfer of 17 political prisoners on the grounds that the prison is overcrowded. The prison administration however avoided touching more than 350 ordinary prisoners held in the prison.
Six woman prisoners sentenced for PKK and DHKP-C cases were transferred to Gebze M Type Prison on 11 March as 11 others are expecting to be exiled from the prison.
Among the woman prisoners transferred to Gebze Prison are also Emine Kaçar, mother of one, and DHKP-C case prisoner Münever Asçi who was one of the victims of 19 December slaughter of the so called Back to Life Operation in the year 2000.
Not only the transfer of Kaçar and Asçi, but also the way of their criminal conviction obviously reveals the arbitrariness of the “justice” system in Turkey.
Emine Kaçar was taken into custody on 13 November 1999 while touring around with her brother and friends, on charges of “going to mountain to join guerrilla”. After being subjected to torture for seven days at a police station, Emine was sent to jail on the basis of the slander by police. Emine, despite being released in 2000, was once more arrested one year later on the basis of the same court file. This time, she was released after spending four months in jail. However, in 2003, Emine was this time arrested with her brother and held in prison until her release in 2004 in accordance with a new legal arrangement made.
Still, nothing changed even after Emine, who got married in 2006, gave her baby the name Özgür (free) as a reaction to the usurpation of her freedom in an arbitrary manner. After being arrested for three times on the basis of the same court file, Emine Kaçar was this time found guilty of membership to the organization, which made her son Özgür one of the “jailed” children in Turkey.
Münever Asçi was in Bayrampasa prison when the state carried out operations in 20 separate prisons within the scope of Back to Life Operation. During the assault by special operation teams of Ankara Gendarme Command of Public Security, the left side of Münever’s face was burnt when she was trying to protect her woman comrades who were slaughtered with chemicals dropped on C Block of the prison. 12 prisoners were shot dead or died burning in this operation.
As the main individual responsible for the operation were once again absolved from the case, 39 soldiers who didn’t take part in the operation were taken to court for the operation. On the other hand, Münever Asçi who had been tried for the same case since 1991 was sent to Bakirköy L Type Prison to complete her sentence. And now, with Emine Kaçar, she has been arbitrarily transferred to Gebze M Type prison.
Anti-Americanism, a political ploy, or VERY well justified and spreading?
Or, actually, what psychopaths are working on and wants as to get justification of destabilizations, global mass genocidal war-fares as put in system in the mass genocidal global steamroller with maintained totalitarian military states, claimed to be “important allies for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East,” like Turkey, for decades. Etc..
Oh yeah...we can very much develope this argumentation, reasoning further.
West stonewalling democracy in Bahrain
IOF soldiers open machinegun fire at residential quarters south of Gaza
Oh yeah...we can very much develope this argumentation, reasoning further.
West stonewalling democracy in Bahrain
IOF soldiers open machinegun fire at residential quarters south of Gaza
No Way Home: In Afghanistan, Former Refugees Are Left Out in the Cold
Child witnesses to Afghan massacre say Robert Bales was not alone
No Way Home: In Afghanistan, Former Refugees Are Left Out in the Cold
Military’s Land Seizures Feed Resentment in Helmand
IWPR: Residents of parts of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan have accused both government and NATO forces of taking over and occupying private houses without paying compensation to the owners. A resident of Musa Qala district, Shawali, said foreign troops had been using a property belonging to him for several years without any kind of reimbursement. Full news...
Local militia seen behind Ghor insecurity
Inevitable injustices in unjust war
PAN: Incidents of violence against journalists showed a 38 percent increase in 2011, rising concerns among the community that the hostility could continue to rise this year, a media support organisation said on Monday. “On average, three journalists have been killed in Afghanistan every year. In the most recent case, the manager of Melma radio station was murdered in (southeastern) Paktika province,” the group said. Full news...
Up to 20 U.S. troops involved in Kandahar massacre — Afghan probe
We protest against the arrival of the Afghan criminal Mohaqiq in Italy!
No Way Home: In Afghanistan, Former Refugees Are Left Out in the Cold
Military’s Land Seizures Feed Resentment in Helmand
IWPR: Residents of parts of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan have accused both government and NATO forces of taking over and occupying private houses without paying compensation to the owners. A resident of Musa Qala district, Shawali, said foreign troops had been using a property belonging to him for several years without any kind of reimbursement. Full news...
Local militia seen behind Ghor insecurity
Inevitable injustices in unjust war
PAN: Incidents of violence against journalists showed a 38 percent increase in 2011, rising concerns among the community that the hostility could continue to rise this year, a media support organisation said on Monday. “On average, three journalists have been killed in Afghanistan every year. In the most recent case, the manager of Melma radio station was murdered in (southeastern) Paktika province,” the group said. Full news...
Up to 20 U.S. troops involved in Kandahar massacre — Afghan probe
We protest against the arrival of the Afghan criminal Mohaqiq in Italy!
Turkey: Police attack unionists, US: Minnesota slam 'Right to Work' amendment
Turkey: 29.03.2012, ANKARA (DİHA) - Unionists protesting the new education law discussed today in the Parliament as well as the amendment to the pensioners' law have been attacked by the police who used great amounts of tear gas and water cannons.
A great number of demonstrators as well as deputies from the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and People's Republican Party (CHP) have been effected by gas and injured.
It has also been learned that the police attempted to throw some demonstrators down the bridge. Street clashes took place in several locations and a group threw stones to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) building.
Minnesota unions fight ‘Right to Work’ constitutional amendment
March 13, 2012, Demonstrators against "Right to Work" amendment fill halls of Mn State Capitol. Protestors in MN State Capitol slam 'Right to Work' amendment.St. Paul, MN - Over 1000 union members from all sections of the labor movement packed the Minnesota capitol, March 12, as right-wing legislators jammed a so-called ‘Right to Work’ constitutional amendment through a Senate committee. The proposed amendment needs to pass the both houses of the legislature for it to be placed on the ballot this fall.
"This amendment is an attack on workers and unions," said Cherrene Horazuk, chief steward of AFSCME Local 3800, "it would kill our power at the bargaining table."
Steve Fadness, a Duluth pipe fitter stated, “We have to stop this legislation because we won't be able to get back what we lose if it passes."
Tom Fox, a retired member of the National Association of Letter Carriers, commented, “If this anti-worker amendment passes it will pit worker against worker and state against state and will domino to other states.”
A member of Minnesota Nurses Association, Susan Kreitz said, “Without a union workers will be mistreated and patient care would decline. We want Minnesota to stay a state with a vibrant union movement.”
The proposed amendment was heard in the Senate Judiciary Committee to a standing room only crowd, while outside the hearing room union members packed the hallways chanting “Hey hey! Ho ho! Union busting has got to go!” “Right to work - bad deal! Right to work - unsafe!” and, hearkening back to the 2011 Madison union mobilizations, “Kill the bill!”
For over three hours, the power of the unions’ force could be heard and felt throughout the capitol and inside the hearing room. Tom Clark, Treasurer of Firefighters Local 82 and several of his fellow union members were outside the hearing. “Right to work is bad for unions and all of Minnesota. If this passes through committee today we must start a huge education campaign, letting everyone know that over time, ‘Right to Work’ will erode safety, bargaining power and workers rights.”
Diane Ersbo of Teamsters local 638 said, “I am here because I value my union job. Because I have a son with a disability, decent health care is really important. I make good wages; I’m paid equally on the shop floor compared to my male counterparts; I’m treated with respect. Right to work would end all of that. It’s important that we not wait until it gets to the ballot because there is too much at stake. Now is the time to do everything you can to stand up against this amendment.”
The amendment passed the committee 7-6, with one Republican voting against it. As politicians left the hearing room, they had to go through a gauntlet of people chanting “Shame! Shame!” and “We will return.” Republican Senators who voted for the amendment hurriedly walk past protesters and into an elevator, escorted by an entourage of police.
From here, the will move to the Rules and Administration Committee before going to the full Senate.
Martin Goff from UNITE HERE Local 17 commented, “This amendment is a culmination of attacks on the social safety net and unions, while also deregulating businesses, allowing them to reap unprecedented profits on the backs of workers.”
By Kim DeFranco and Tracy Molm
http://www.fightbacknews.org/
A great number of demonstrators as well as deputies from the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and People's Republican Party (CHP) have been effected by gas and injured.
It has also been learned that the police attempted to throw some demonstrators down the bridge. Street clashes took place in several locations and a group threw stones to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) building.
Minnesota unions fight ‘Right to Work’ constitutional amendment
March 13, 2012, Demonstrators against "Right to Work" amendment fill halls of Mn State Capitol. Protestors in MN State Capitol slam 'Right to Work' amendment.St. Paul, MN - Over 1000 union members from all sections of the labor movement packed the Minnesota capitol, March 12, as right-wing legislators jammed a so-called ‘Right to Work’ constitutional amendment through a Senate committee. The proposed amendment needs to pass the both houses of the legislature for it to be placed on the ballot this fall.
"This amendment is an attack on workers and unions," said Cherrene Horazuk, chief steward of AFSCME Local 3800, "it would kill our power at the bargaining table."
Steve Fadness, a Duluth pipe fitter stated, “We have to stop this legislation because we won't be able to get back what we lose if it passes."
Tom Fox, a retired member of the National Association of Letter Carriers, commented, “If this anti-worker amendment passes it will pit worker against worker and state against state and will domino to other states.”
A member of Minnesota Nurses Association, Susan Kreitz said, “Without a union workers will be mistreated and patient care would decline. We want Minnesota to stay a state with a vibrant union movement.”
The proposed amendment was heard in the Senate Judiciary Committee to a standing room only crowd, while outside the hearing room union members packed the hallways chanting “Hey hey! Ho ho! Union busting has got to go!” “Right to work - bad deal! Right to work - unsafe!” and, hearkening back to the 2011 Madison union mobilizations, “Kill the bill!”
For over three hours, the power of the unions’ force could be heard and felt throughout the capitol and inside the hearing room. Tom Clark, Treasurer of Firefighters Local 82 and several of his fellow union members were outside the hearing. “Right to work is bad for unions and all of Minnesota. If this passes through committee today we must start a huge education campaign, letting everyone know that over time, ‘Right to Work’ will erode safety, bargaining power and workers rights.”
Diane Ersbo of Teamsters local 638 said, “I am here because I value my union job. Because I have a son with a disability, decent health care is really important. I make good wages; I’m paid equally on the shop floor compared to my male counterparts; I’m treated with respect. Right to work would end all of that. It’s important that we not wait until it gets to the ballot because there is too much at stake. Now is the time to do everything you can to stand up against this amendment.”
The amendment passed the committee 7-6, with one Republican voting against it. As politicians left the hearing room, they had to go through a gauntlet of people chanting “Shame! Shame!” and “We will return.” Republican Senators who voted for the amendment hurriedly walk past protesters and into an elevator, escorted by an entourage of police.
From here, the will move to the Rules and Administration Committee before going to the full Senate.
Martin Goff from UNITE HERE Local 17 commented, “This amendment is a culmination of attacks on the social safety net and unions, while also deregulating businesses, allowing them to reap unprecedented profits on the backs of workers.”
By Kim DeFranco and Tracy Molm
http://www.fightbacknews.org/
Hillary Clinton, working for the Nazis?
Army Wants Flapping Wings to Fly Drones of the Future http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/army-wings/
Antiwar.com Newsletter March 30, 2012 Free the Slaves, Stop the Wars
http://www.fightbacknews.org/
Coming to a Neighborhood Near You
US Blocking Probe of Afghan Massacre
Pentagon Seeks New Authority for Counterterrorism Fight
Whatever Happened to Arms Control?
Poles Talk About CIA Prison, Breaking Silence
Why Does the Department of Homeland Security Need 450 Million Hollow-Point Bullets?
Afghanistan Presses for Answers on Long-Term US Military Bases
North Korea Says US Breaking Nuclear Deal Over Rocket
Navy: We're 4 Years Away From Laser Guns on Ships
New Jersey Marine Killed Two Weeks Before Returning Home
Father of Three Children, Providence (RI) Guardsman Died Saving Afghan Girl
Jerome (ID) Soldier Never Got the Chance to Meet His Three-Month-Old Twin Daughters
Vinton (LA) Soldier Leaves Behind Wife, Three Children
Afghan Witnesses to the Bales Massacre Speak Out
War and Presidential Greatness
Antiwar.com Newsletter March 30, 2012 Free the Slaves, Stop the Wars
http://www.fightbacknews.org/
Coming to a Neighborhood Near You
US Blocking Probe of Afghan Massacre
Pentagon Seeks New Authority for Counterterrorism Fight
Whatever Happened to Arms Control?
Poles Talk About CIA Prison, Breaking Silence
Why Does the Department of Homeland Security Need 450 Million Hollow-Point Bullets?
Afghanistan Presses for Answers on Long-Term US Military Bases
North Korea Says US Breaking Nuclear Deal Over Rocket
Navy: We're 4 Years Away From Laser Guns on Ships
New Jersey Marine Killed Two Weeks Before Returning Home
Father of Three Children, Providence (RI) Guardsman Died Saving Afghan Girl
Jerome (ID) Soldier Never Got the Chance to Meet His Three-Month-Old Twin Daughters
Vinton (LA) Soldier Leaves Behind Wife, Three Children
Afghan Witnesses to the Bales Massacre Speak Out
War and Presidential Greatness
Aerial attack in Kandil, Integrity official, family hit by sticky bomb in Tikrit
01 April 2012, New attack by Turkish warplanes. Turkish army has launched an aerial assault in the Kandil area controlled by People’s Defense Forces (HPG) guerrillas.
According to reports received from local sources, Turkish warplanes have launched an attack in the area at early 1 April morning, between 04.00-5.30 o’clock.
3/30/2012, Aswat al-Iraq: Integrity official, family hit by sticky bomb in Tikrit. An Integrity Commission official and his family were hit by a sticky bomb in his car north of Tikrit. The family including his wife and five children. No other details were given.
Blast heard near GZ as Arab summit starts
3/29/2012 BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: A blast was heard near the heavily-fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad as proceedings of the Arab League Summit hosted in the Iraqi capital started on Thursday.
“An explosion was heard near the entrance of the Green Zone, followed by gunfire that stopped later,” a witness told Aswat al-Iraq news agency. The 23rd AL Summit started in Baghdad, where representatives of 21 Arab countries, including 10 Arab leaders, are taking part. The Iraqi capital has seen unprecedented tight security measures for the ordinary session hosted in Baghdad for the third time in its history.
3/26/2012, Ten wanted were arrested, including a gang wanted for distribution of drugs north of Kut city, police sources said today. General Hussein Abdul Hadi told Aswat al-Iraq that eight of the arrested belong to Qaeda organization. The arrest took place in Suwaira area, 135 km north of Kut.
He added that they were implicated with armed operations against the civilians and the security forces in the province, pointing that the raid was done according to intelligence information and judicial warrants for terrorism charges.
Another two were arrested for drugs dealings among the youth in the city. Yesterday, police forces arrested seven wanted persons belong to Qaeda organization during a raid in the same area.
3/29/2012, 2 cops killed, 3 wounded in Salah al-Din
3/27/2012, 2 targeted in Diwaniya
Soldier killed, one wounded in explosion east of Fallujah
3/26/2012, Suicide bomber killed, 7 wanted men detained in Mosul
8 wanted men arrested in Kirkuk
3/25/2012, Curfew and search operation in Kirkuk
3/24/2012, Rockets cache found north of Kut
11 arrested for terrorism in Kirkuk
Cop killed, 2 wounded in explosion south Fallujah
According to reports received from local sources, Turkish warplanes have launched an attack in the area at early 1 April morning, between 04.00-5.30 o’clock.
3/30/2012, Aswat al-Iraq: Integrity official, family hit by sticky bomb in Tikrit. An Integrity Commission official and his family were hit by a sticky bomb in his car north of Tikrit. The family including his wife and five children. No other details were given.
Blast heard near GZ as Arab summit starts
3/29/2012 BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: A blast was heard near the heavily-fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad as proceedings of the Arab League Summit hosted in the Iraqi capital started on Thursday.
“An explosion was heard near the entrance of the Green Zone, followed by gunfire that stopped later,” a witness told Aswat al-Iraq news agency. The 23rd AL Summit started in Baghdad, where representatives of 21 Arab countries, including 10 Arab leaders, are taking part. The Iraqi capital has seen unprecedented tight security measures for the ordinary session hosted in Baghdad for the third time in its history.
3/26/2012, Ten wanted were arrested, including a gang wanted for distribution of drugs north of Kut city, police sources said today. General Hussein Abdul Hadi told Aswat al-Iraq that eight of the arrested belong to Qaeda organization. The arrest took place in Suwaira area, 135 km north of Kut.
He added that they were implicated with armed operations against the civilians and the security forces in the province, pointing that the raid was done according to intelligence information and judicial warrants for terrorism charges.
Another two were arrested for drugs dealings among the youth in the city. Yesterday, police forces arrested seven wanted persons belong to Qaeda organization during a raid in the same area.
3/29/2012, 2 cops killed, 3 wounded in Salah al-Din
3/27/2012, 2 targeted in Diwaniya
Soldier killed, one wounded in explosion east of Fallujah
3/26/2012, Suicide bomber killed, 7 wanted men detained in Mosul
8 wanted men arrested in Kirkuk
3/25/2012, Curfew and search operation in Kirkuk
3/24/2012, Rockets cache found north of Kut
11 arrested for terrorism in Kirkuk
Cop killed, 2 wounded in explosion south Fallujah
Was Saddam really hanged or was he cloned into 8?
Maybe the complete #¤#¤¤ idiots on USAK can answer on that as they thought it was a such a great idea to take up the "Turkish-Saddam cooperation" again after he was hanged.
It would really, REALLY be about time if complete #¤#¤¤ idiots asks themselves if we have missed something here!
It would really, REALLY be about time if complete #¤#¤¤ idiots asks themselves if we have missed something here!
Plea from Imralı prison: "The most sensible approach in this phase is to be physically healthy and concentrate on practical protests".
04 March 2012, Cumali Karsu, Öcalan's prison mate has sent a fax appealing to call off the hunger strikes. Cumali Karsu who is held in the same prison with Abdullah Öcalan, Imralı Special Type Prison, has sent a fax to Asrın lawyers office.
The fax content has been disclosed. Karsu writes: “I am in the position of writing some lines only in case of urgency under current prison conditions. Recent months - he added - have been characterised by a complicated process. As far as we can read from newspapers, we understand protest actions are going on in the country and above all in prisons".
Karsu continued by writing that "although these actions are understandable, it is not strongly necessary to bring these indefinite action to a point where risk for the body and mind is big. We believe - he concluded - these actions should find an end which do not affect people phisically.” Clearly the fax was referring to the hunger strikes going on in many prisons and cities.
Karsu also mentioned the action of self-immolation saying that “These acts which greatly upset us should definitively end and they should be prevented. The most sensible approach in this phase is to be physically healthy and concentrate on practical protests".
The fax ended with a clear indication from Karsu: "We expect you to act in a way that would ensure the end of the ongoing hunger strikes.”
Karsu ended the fax with the following sentences; "The families don’t need to come here in this phase. Thousands of people, including lawyers, have been arrested unlawfully in the recent period. On the other hand, it is necessary to ensure a solution in the social sense and to enable the continuation of the current process which has been locked for some reasons except from our situation."
"The conjunctural situation doesn’t show some promise but time will tell how the process will progress. I don’t give details about our situation as you may guess under which circumstances we are being held. Despite everything, things will get better."
ANF / NEWS DESK
The fax content has been disclosed. Karsu writes: “I am in the position of writing some lines only in case of urgency under current prison conditions. Recent months - he added - have been characterised by a complicated process. As far as we can read from newspapers, we understand protest actions are going on in the country and above all in prisons".
Karsu continued by writing that "although these actions are understandable, it is not strongly necessary to bring these indefinite action to a point where risk for the body and mind is big. We believe - he concluded - these actions should find an end which do not affect people phisically.” Clearly the fax was referring to the hunger strikes going on in many prisons and cities.
Karsu also mentioned the action of self-immolation saying that “These acts which greatly upset us should definitively end and they should be prevented. The most sensible approach in this phase is to be physically healthy and concentrate on practical protests".
The fax ended with a clear indication from Karsu: "We expect you to act in a way that would ensure the end of the ongoing hunger strikes.”
Karsu ended the fax with the following sentences; "The families don’t need to come here in this phase. Thousands of people, including lawyers, have been arrested unlawfully in the recent period. On the other hand, it is necessary to ensure a solution in the social sense and to enable the continuation of the current process which has been locked for some reasons except from our situation."
"The conjunctural situation doesn’t show some promise but time will tell how the process will progress. I don’t give details about our situation as you may guess under which circumstances we are being held. Despite everything, things will get better."
ANF / NEWS DESK
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