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Iraqi Civilians In The Media!

In the media coverage for the Iraq war, what you constantly hear about is the plight of the poor American soldiers, fighting and dying Over There. What you rarely hear about is the plight of the ordinary Iraqis, who are the biggest victims in all of this. So the NYTimes printing an editorial on their struggle is something of a rarity.

The Iraq Ministry of Health reported that 102 doctors and 164 nurses were killed from April 2003 to May 2006. It is believed that nearly half of Iraq's doctors have fled. The exodus of health care professionals in a country hemorrhaging from the worst kinds of violence pretty much qualifies as nightmarish.

While more than two million Iraqis have fled to other countries, another two million have been displaced internally. According to the Global Policy Forum, a group that monitors international developments:

"Most of these internally displaced persons, or I.D.P.'s, have sought refuge with relatives, or in mosques, empty public buildings, or tent camps.... I.D.P.'s live in very poor conditions. Public buildings are particularly unsanitary, often overcrowded, without access to clean water, proper sanitation and basic services, in conditions especially conducive to infectious diseases."

Iraqis are enduring most of their suffering out of the sight of the rest of the world. International relief organizations and most of the news media are largely kept at a distance by the insane levels of violence.

- TruthOut.org

And furthermore, step on up Alan Greenspan.



Wild Wild (Middle) East.

It's tough to find security in Iraq these days. The country is such a mess anyone official has to spend most of their time thinking about how to dodge attacks. Which is why private security firms have become so prevalent and successful in the country. Blackwater, the largest of these firms, got itself in deep ...water this week when it's personnel shot a bunch of civilians during an attack.

Details of Sunday's incident were unclear.

Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight civilians were killed and 13 were wounded when contractors believed to be working for Blackwater USA opened fire on civilians in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Mansour in western Baghdad.

"We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities," Khalaf said.

He said witness reports pointed to Blackwater involvement but added that the shooting was still under investigation. One witness, Hussein Abdul-Abbas, said the explosion was followed by about 20 minutes of heavy gunfire and "everybody in the street started to flee immediately."

- EditorAndPublisher.com

Now I can understand these guys being nervous, but 8 civilians dead in one action calls for some serious investigations. And this isn't the first time Blackwater personnel has been involved in some serious shit.

On Dec. 24, 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee shot and killed a bodyguard for Iraq's Shiite vice president, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.

The contractor had gotten lost on the way back to his barracks in the Green Zone and fired at least seven times when he was confronted by 30-year-old Raheem Khalaf Saadoun, an official in the vice president's office said on condition of anonymity because the case is still under investigation.
[...]

In May, Blackwater guards under contract to the State Department were involved in two other shootings in Iraq.

In one, a Blackwater guard shot to death an Iraqi deemed to be driving too close to a security detail near the Interior Ministry in Baghdad, enraging Iraqis. At the time, Tyrrell said the guard acted lawfully and appropriately, given the incident reports and witness accounts.

A day earlier, Blackwater guards and Interior Ministry forces exchanged gunfire on the streets of the capital. A passing U.S. military convoy intervened and stopped the fighting.

- NYTimes.com

You know something is seriously wrong with a country when the security people are acting more like a militia, and the army are the ones calming things down.



Crest Of The Wave.

Remember back in the heady days of 2003 when President Bush and his various cronies would go and on about how dangerous Iraq was, and how they defy the entire world and have WMD's and are weeks away from killing everyone on the planet? And everyone (else) believed this because, well surely politicians wouldn't lie to us? And Saddam seemed so ...vicious, and undignified, and evil, and arabic. Well here we are, four years later, and the same old song is being sung by the same band, just in a slightly different key.

The drumbeat for a military assault on Iran is getting louder at some conservative think tanks, in the offices of hawks on the Bush and Cheney staffs, and among ground forces in Iraq dealing with weapons and explosives constructed in Iran.

Administration calls for aggressive action to destroy Iran's nuclear program, and to cut off its funneling of arms and training to terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East, have featured increasingly tough rhetoric.

In his September 13 televised speech, President Bush pointedly warned of the threat from Iran:

"If we were to be driven out of Iraq,...Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. Extremists could control a key part of the global energy supply."

There is unanimous agreement on both sides of the ideological aisle that talk of a strike against Tehran and other sites in Iran has escalated sharply in recent weeks.

Much of the public discussion of military action is designed to serve as a trial balloon to test reaction to such proposals among Congressional leaders and other key players.

- HuffingtonPost.com

Yes, despite the blood and the mess and the pain and the decades of damage done due to last few years of war, the Men of Power are interested in starting another fight. Some might be wondering why, but it's really quite obvious. These people firmly believe in securing a legacy for themselves, their families and their countrymen in the uncertain future. If that means stomping on a bunch of "foreign" countries far far away, who don't even share the same religion, then that's fine. As long as the extremists are all busy scratching around amongst the rubble of various destroyed middle eastern cities, then they'll be staying away from what these men hold dear. And that really is what the war on terror boils down to for these people, so far above it all they can barely make out the details: a compost heap in the back yard that keeps the flies away from the front lawn. It's realpolitik at it's most exposed level, and it's sickening.



Unstoppable.

So, who can stop it this time? Is it even stoppable? Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA (of all people) is trying to stop this drift toward war with Iran. Not that the Men of Power will listen to him, but he's still talking sense.

The UN's chief nuclear weapons inspector yesterday warned against the use of force against Iran, in what UN officials said was an attempt to halt an "out of control" drift to war.

His outspoken remarks, which drew a parallel between Iran and Iraq, appeared to take aim at the US and Britain. They followed comments on Sunday night by the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who said: "We have to prepare for the worst," adding "the worst is war".

"I would not talk about any use of force," Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters at the International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Vienna. "There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons."

There has been a string of reports out of Washington that the Bush administration is running out of patience with diplomacy and is intensifying its plans for air strikes as a means of halting Iran's disputed nuclear programme.

UN officials said Mr ElBaradei, an Egyptian diplomat who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2005, was attempting to slow down what seemed to be an accelerating march to war.

"There's a strategic reason for doing these things," one official said. "He really is alarmed. He sees this thing going out of control. The feeling around here is that this looks like the run-up to the Iraq war."

- The Guardian

See, the Bush administration already dealt with this by fundamentally undermining the U.N in the run up to the Iraq war. They essentially de-fanged the U.N by simply declaring war on Iraq, forcing the U.N to scramble out of the way. If the U.N couldn't stop that, then how can they stop anything America wants to do? And for that matter, who else can actually stop America, should she decide to start a war with Iran? Anyone get the feeling that that whole 'One single world superpower' thing is turning into a bad idea?


Osama The Grouch?

Recently, a video from Bin Laden was distributed across the internbet where he made various references to current events, and warnings agains the west. After careful scrutiny of this video, some interesting questions have been raised.

The video freezes at about 1 minute and 36 58 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30. The video then freezes again at 14:02 remains frozen until the end. All references to current events, such as the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, and Sarkozy and Brown being the leaders of France and the UK, respectively, occur when the video is frozen!

- Boomantribune.com

This could be simply a case of Al Queda stitching an old video to a new audio recording (and the CIA seemed to think it was his voice), but it does raise the possibility that Bin Laden himself is merely being used by someone else. So the big question becomes: if Bin Laden has been turned into a puppet, who's pulling the strings?



Image O' The Week.






Catching a Meteorite.

Generally, apart from their velocity, things from space are harmless. Rocks, garnished with some ice, crash into the planet every now and then, make some noise, and a hole, and that's it. But something happened in Southern Peru this week. Something ...disturbing.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.

Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.

"Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned," he said.

- Yahoo.com

Unless this is some kind of publicity stunt for a movie, this seems quite alarming. It's one thing to avoid airports, cities, and various celebrities for the sake of ones health, but when rocks from space start infecting people, things can get out of hand. And one thing that you may not have considered? What if this is some kind of intergalactic chemical weapon, shot off by those jealous Pluto-ians?



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