Iraq

NOVANEWS   by: Katherine Hughes t r u t h o u t,   February 26, 2011, marks the eighth anniversary of the imprisonment of Dr. Rafil Dhafir. Dhafir continues to pay the price for feeding the children of Iraq during the US- and UK-sponsored UN sanctions against that country. According to the United Nations’ own statistics, every month throughout the 1990′s, 6,000 children under the age of five in Iraq were dying from lack of food and access to simple medicines. Three senior UN officials resigned because of what they considered a “genocidal” policy of sanctions against Iraq. Dhafir’s charity, Help the Needy (HTN), openly sent food and medicines to starving civilians in Iraq during the brutal embargo. Seven government agencies investigated Dhafir and HTN for many years. They inte...

NOVANEWS Posted By: Sammi Ibrahem Chair of West Midland PSC   Source–English.news.cn BEIJING, April 10 (Xinhua) — U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been causing huge civilian casualties with 63 percent of some 109,000 people killed in the Iraq war being civilians, according to a report on the U.S. human rights record released on Sunday. The figures were quoted from a WikiLeaks trove by the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010, which was released by the Information Office of China’s State Council in response to the country reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010 issued by the U.S. Department of State. Figures from the WikiLeaks website also revealed up to 285,000 war casualties in Iraq from March 2003 through the end of 2009, according to the report. “Th...

NOVANEWS Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem Chair of West Midland PSC     Source–wired.com   Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, to make the case for war in Iraq. A central plank of his presentation: the anthrax attacks that killed five people and helped send the United States into a panic in the days after 9/11. “Less than a teaspoonful of dry anthrax in an envelope shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001. This forced several hundred people to undergo emergency medical treatment and killed two postal workers just from an amount just about this quantity that was inside of an envelope,” Powell said. “Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters [6,600 gallons]. If concentrated into this dry form, this amount would be en...

NOVANEWS August 23, 2010  by Michael Leon  Bush Lied: 100,000s dead, traumatized, wounded and tortured By Medea Benjamin (opednews.com) With the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, the administration, the military and the media are trying to put a positive spin on this grim chapter of U.S. history. It would certainly give some comfort to the grieving families of the over 4,400 soldiers killed in Iraq if their sacrifices had left Iraq a better place or made America safer. But the bitter truth is that the U.S. intervention has been an utter disaster for both Iraq and the United States. First let’s acknowledge that we should have never attacked Iraq to begin with. Iraq had no connection with our 9/11 attackers, had no weapons of mass destruction and represented no threat to the Unite...

NOVANEWS Counter-Insurgency (COIN) Using Power or Prudence? August 12, 2010  by Michael Leon     Psychological impact of terrorism on target population.- Counter-insurgency (COIN) against the terrorists, whether Iraqis or Afghanis, who were essentially George Bush’s military targets, and one has reasons to believe that Obama is now contemplating targeting Iran to add special feather to his cap to earn the second term in the Presidential elections - By Dr. S.M. Rahman Terrorism abhors power. It tends to even multiply, contrary to the US predilection to eradicate every single Al-Qaeda-brand ‘terrorist’ besides the hard-core Taliban, who are considered potential threat to US security and dread, perhaps a replay of 9/11 type tragedy. The limits of military power has been heroically demonstra...