Monday, August 22, 2011

The ongoing violence in the ongoing war

Wang Guanqun (Xinhua) reports, "Three Iraqi soldiers were killed and six people wounded in bomb and gunfire attacks in Baghdad and Iraq's northern city of Mosul, the police said on Monday." The violence never ends in the ongoing war which is one of the points Mehdi Hasan makes in "Barack Obama's wars without end" (Guardian):

Iraq, meanwhile, has become the forgotten war – yet an astonishing 47,000 US troops remain stationed there. Earlier this month, Obama told a group of supporters: "If somebody asks about the war [in Iraq] … you have a pretty simple answer, which is all our folks are going to be out of there by the end of the year."
Not quite. US military leaders expect to keep up to 10,000 "folks" in Iraq beyond the 31 December 2011 deadline, agreed by the Bush administration, for a full US withdrawal. Obama's hawkish new defence secretary, Leon Panetta, used his Senate confirmation hearings in June to announce that he had "every confidence" that the Iraqi government would "request" US troops to stay on in the country beyond the end of the year. However the anti-US Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr declared this month that any foreign soldier remaining in Iraq in 2012 would "be treated as an unjust invader and should be opposed with military resistance". So we can expect further bloodshed in that benighted nation: America's Mesopotamian misadventure is far from over.

The violence has also included, since Wednesday, Turkish military planes bombing northern Iraq where, yesterday, they killed a family of five. Aswat al-Iraq reports, "The President of northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Massoud Barzani, has expressed anger and condemnation for the Turkish air raids on border areas in Kurdistan Region, that killed 7 Kurdish citizens on Sunday." Dar Addustour notes that Sunday was the fifth day in a row that the Turkish military bombed northern Iraq using "the pretext" (their term) of the PKK to do so. That's probably the best word choice possible. Dar Addustour also notes talk of appealing the issue to the United Nations Security Council. Al Sabaah reports that a delegation from the Iraqi Parliament's Commission on Security and Defense will be visiting the areas shelled to determine the damage being inflicted which they will report back to Parliament.

Meanwhile Al Mada reports the Parliament's Human Rights Commission is calling for the issue of "confidential informants" to be addressed due to the fact that many people are behind bars who may be innocent but were accused by "confidential informants." Parliament has been attempting to craft an amnesty law and many MPs state that any general policy must also address those imprisoned due to "confidential informants." Last year, Parliament voted into law a policy that would lead to maximum sentences for "confidential informants" who provided false information but that hoped for deterrent has had little impact.

Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Got A Vacation To Take Care Of First" went up last night.
On the latest Law and Disorder Radio -- airs this morning at 10:00 a.m. on WBAI and around the country throughout the week, hosts Heidi Boghosian, Michael S. Smith and Michael Ratner (Center for Constitutional Rights) devote the hour to exploring abuse in the Pennslvania state prison system with guests Bret Grote, Liz Springer and Theresa Shoatz.


The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.


































Posted by at