Peace and Justice Post

Andy Sullivan

Reuters North American News Service, Mar 19, 2008 19:22 EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than 160 people were arrested across the United States Wednesday as protesters marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq obstructed downtown traffic and tried to block access to government offices.document.write(“”+”“); There were 32 arrests in Washington after demonstrators attempted to block entrances to the Internal Revenue Service, while 30 others were arrested outside a congressional office building, police said.

Protesters had hoped to shut down the IRS, the U.S. tax collection agency, to highlight the cost of the war. Police cleared the building’s entrances within an hour.

In San Francisco, long a center of anti-Iraq war sentiment, police arrested more than 100 people who protested through the day along Market Street in the central business district, a spokesman said.

Sgt. Steve Maninna said officers had arrested 101 people on charges including trespassing, resisting arrest and obstructing traffic.

Four women were also detained for hanging a large banner off the city’s famous Golden Gate Bridge and then released, said bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie.

On Washington’s National Mall, about 100 protesters carried signs that read: “The Endlessness Justifies the Meaninglessness” and waved upside-down U.S. flags, a traditional sign of distress.

“Bush and Cheney, leaders failed, Bush and Cheney belong in jail,” they chanted, referring to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Continued . . .

By Dahr Jamail
Inter Press Service News Agency Wednesday 19 March 2008

Washington – Devastation on the ground and largely held Iraqi opinion contradicts claims by U.S. officials that the situation in Iraq has improved towards the fifth anniversary of the invasion Mar. 20.

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, during a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday declared the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a “successful endeavour”.

According to the group Just Foreign Policy, more than a million Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and occupation, now entering its sixth year. A survey by British polling agency ORB estimates the number of dead at more than 1.2 million.

Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book with co-author Linda Bilmes of Harvard University titled ‘The Three Trillion Dollar War’, a figure it considers a “conservative estimate” of the long-range price tag of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The authors say the Bush administration has repeatedly “low-balled” the cost of the war, and has kept a set of records hidden from the U.S. public.

According to the U.S. Department of Defence, close to 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The number of British casualties is 175.

“The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain,” journalist Patrick Cockburn of London’s Independent Newspaper wrote Mar. 17. “It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided, and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish.”

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than four million Iraqis are displaced from their homes, with roughly half of them outside of the country.

The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that one in every four residents of Baghdad, a city of six million, is displaced from home.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report Mar. 17 that millions are still deprived of clean water and medical care.

Iraq’s infrastructure is worse on every measurable level compared to Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and including 12 years of the harshest economic sanctions in history. During those sanctions more than a million Iraqis died from malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care.

The international aid group Oxfam International released a report last July that found that four million Iraqis were in need of emergency assistance. It found a 9 percent increase in childhood malnutrition, and that 70 percent of Iraqis lacked access to safe drinking water.

The average home in Iraq, even in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq that has been held up by the Bush administration as an example of success, has on average less than five hours of electricity a day.

Oil exports, from which Iraq has obtained over 80 percent of its income, have not for a single day of the occupation matched pre-war levels.

Unemployment, already 32 percent before the invasion, has vacillated during the occupation between 40-70 percent, according to the Iraqi government.

With more than a million dead, more than four million displaced, and another four million in need of emergency aid, a third of Iraqis are displaced, in need of emergency aid – or dead.

All this Cheney calls a “successful endeavour”.

Continued . . .

Antiwar protesters said yesterday that they plan a series of demonstrations starting this evening and lasting through tomorrow that could disrupt traffic, hamper commuters and block access to some buildings in downtown Washington.

The actions, aimed to draw attention to the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, are directed at business, government, political and media centers that demonstrators blame for the continuation of the war, according to members of the United For Peace and Justice coalition, which is heading the protest.

Activists plan tomorrow morning to target the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service, at 12th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, which they said they hope to shut down. They said they will also protest at various corporations in the vicinity of K Street between 13th and 18th streets NW.

Antiwar military veterans plan a 9 a.m. march tomorrow on the Mall from the National Museum of the American Indian to the Capitol.

Other events — including a die-in, a knit-in and a torture simulation — are planned at the Department of Veterans Affairs, McPherson Square, Lafayette Square, the American Petroleum Institute and the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee on Capitol Hill.

Some activists plan a 9:30 a.m. “March of the Dead” from Arlington National Cemetery into the District, with stops at war memorials and the Department of State. Others plan to demonstrate at The Washington Post, local offices of ABC, CNN, Fox and United Press International and the National Press Building.

Continued . . .

Responsibility for this spectacular tragedy must lie with those who ignored the facts five years ago

Haaretz, March 19, 2008

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry | Consortiumnews.com,March 18, 2008

Editor’s Note: The Iraq War – now ending its fifth bloody year – represents not only a human tragedy of enormous consequence and possibly the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history but also a systemic failure of American political and journalistic institutions.

Instead of checking George W. Bush’s imperial impulse for the good of the Republic, the Congress – including Sen. Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats – and the national press corps tended to their careers and their political viability.

In recognition of this tragedy – and in honor of the thousands of American dead and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead – we are publishing the first of two excerpts from Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush:

Iraq’s “Day of Liberation” – as George W. Bush called it – was supposed to begin with a bombardment consisting of 3,000 U.S. missiles delivered over 48 hours, 10 times the number of bombs dropped during the first two days of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Officials, who were briefed on the plans, said the goal was to so stun the Iraqis that they would simply submit to the overwhelming force demonstrated by the U.S. military. Administration officials dubbed the strategy “shock and awe.”

In his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush had addressed the “brave and oppressed people of Iraq” with the reassuring message that “your enemy is not surrounding your country – your enemy is ruling your country.”

Bush promised that the day that Saddam Hussein and his regime “are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.”

But never before in history had a dominant world power planned to strike a much weaker nation in a preemptive war with such ferocity. It would be liberation through devastation.

Continued . . .

Khaleej Times, March 19, 2008
(AFP)

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan’s parliament Wednesday convened a special session to elect its first female speaker, a loyalist from the party of slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Fahmida Mirza, 52, is all but certain to win the top post in the 342-seat lower house of parliament, or national assembly.

‘This is my third tenure in the national assembly and I believe it is time that we all work together to address the challenges facing the country,’ Mirza told reporters before the session.

‘I am sure that we will be able to face these challenges with the support of parliamentarians, our people and Pakistani media.’

Mirza, a veteran politician from Bhutto’s home province of Sindh, would be the first female speaker in the 60-year history of this deeply conservative Islamic nation of 160 million people.

Bhutto was killed in a gun and suicide attack at an election rally on December 27. Her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) won the most seats in elections last month and is set to lead a coalition government.

‘The election of Fahmida Mirza as speaker will be a big step towards the empowerment of women in Pakistan,’ Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a central PPP leader, told reporters.

The party supporting key US ally President Pervez Musharraf, which suffered a crushing defeat in the elections last month, has also put forth a candidate for the speaker’s post.

The speaker conducts the business of the house, deciding which debates or motions are allowed and will play a key role in a parliament that looks set for a major showdown with Musharraf.

Musharraf, whose popularity has slumped amid rising Islamic militancy and economic problems, is desperate to find a political ally after his backers were trounced in the elections on February 18.

The Independent, UK, March 19, 2008

Patrick Cockburn

It has been a war of lies from the start. All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.

The outcome has been an official picture of Iraq akin to fantasy and an inability to learn from mistakes because of a refusal to admit that any occurred. Yet the war began with just such a mistake. Five years ago, on the evening of 19 March 2003, President George Bush appeared on American television to say that military action had started against Iraq.

This was a veiled reference to an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein by dropping four 2,000lb bombs and firing 40 cruise missiles at a place called al-Dura farm in south Baghdad, where the Iraqi leader was supposedly hiding in a bunker. There was no bunker. The only casualties were one civilian killed and 14 wounded, including nine women and a child.

On 7 April, the US Ai r Force dropped four more massive bombs on a house where Saddam was said to have been sighted in Baghdad. “I think we did get Saddam Hussein,” said the US Vice President, Dick Cheney. “He was seen being dug out of the rubble and wasn’t able to breathe.”

Saddam was unharmed, probably because he had never been there, but 18 Iraqi civilians were dead. One US military leader defended the attacks, claiming they showed “US resolve and capabilities”.

Continued . . .

The Raw Story, March 17, 2008

Nick Juliano

Photographer wanted to expose ‘what the military was allowing to happen’

Some of the most iconic images of the Iraq war came not from photojournalists on the front lines, but US soldiers carrying point-and-shoot digital cameras. In its latest issue, the New Yorker profiles the woman who snapped many of the photos depicting abuse at Abu Ghraib prison that the same magazine revealed nearly four years ago.

Like many of the soldiers in charge of the detained Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, Sabrina Harman had little experience running a prison. As Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris report, she and others in her Army Reserve unit didn’t stick out at the prison, “where almost nothing was run according to military doctrine.”

The low-ranking reservist soldiers who took and appeared in the infamous images were singled out for opprobrium and punishment; they were represented, in government reports, in the press, and before courts-martial, as rogues who acted out of depravity. Yet the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. [Military Intelligence] block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.

The article, which appears in the March 24 issue of the New Yorker, has not been posted online, but the magazine has posted additional photos and videos to augment the report.

Continued . . .