Some American media are spreading lies and propaganda, propaganda of creating a split among Sunnis and Iraqis.
Read the title of the Article “
The very Sunni clerics who railed last January against an election “under foreign military occupation’ are now urging their people to take part in both the referendum and the parliamentary balloting in December.
The reality is Bush is in dilemma, he is the one who is trying to twist the truth another way around, he even tried to pay the Sunnis $75 million dollar to get him out of his isolation.
The United States have offered to Sunni representatives USD 75 Million to sign the draft Constitution of Iraq, RIA Novosti announced, citing information of source close to the Constitutional Committee of the country, published in the Saudi daily Al Watan.
US Offered USD 75 Million to Iraqi Sunnis for Signature under Constitution.
Do you see any split here?
All 15 of the Sunni representatives on the negotiating committee stayed away from Sunday’s signing ceremony, refusing to be associated with a document they regard with deep suspicion.
What next for Iraq’s new charter?
Sheikh Fahran Al-Sadeed A Sunni member in the Iraqi parliament in an interview with Elaph newspaper said:
There is a plan by the Americans and the Iraqi government to isolate the western Iraqi regions from the referendum on the constitution by suggesting that these regions are under the domination of the terrorists, the plan is to leave Iraq’s borders open to the terrorists so they can gather in the usual cities as [Anna, Rawa, Qaim and Haditha] and then it will be declared as areas of conflicts to marginalize these ares from participation in the referendum.
Sadded said: we suggested to the commission to send their employees and we working together with tribesmen from the area will protect them but our request is rejected, some areas like Yousfyia and Abu-Ghraib there are no registration centers although they are very near to Baghdad
Source Elaph [Arabic]
Related article
Iraqi constitution dangerously short of US goals: experts.
Ladybird,
What, oh what have you been sniffing? If you are going to continue to post this ludicrous stuff, then please explain what you think Bush should do instead?
1) Dissolve the elected assembly and toss out their constitution?
2) Bribe the Shi’a and Kurds to give up on federalism?
3) Make sure the Sunni-dominated areas continue to get the majority of Iraqi oil revenue?
4) Put a new dictator over Iraq to keep the 80% of Iraqis you don’t like in line?
What, oh what have you been sniffing?
Obviously not the same a you, you dumb yank.
If you are going to continue to post this ludicrous stuff, then please explain what you think Bush should do instead?
Bush should commit suicide like Hitler did or turn himself over to the ICC. The USA should leave Iraq.
1) Dissolve the elected assembly and toss out their constitution?
2) Bribe the Shi’a and Kurds to give up on federalism?
3) Make sure the Sunni-dominated areas continue to get the majority of Iraqi oil revenue?
4) Put a new dictator over Iraq to keep the 80% of Iraqis you don’t like in line?
Once the USA has been kicked out there should be free elections supervised by the UN.
Simply
Okay, Ladybird. I’ll bite. You put quotation marks on “democratic”, how is it *not* democratic?
Even if you hate every jot and tittle of this constitution, how is it that it doesn’t reflect the judgement of the Iraqi’s democratically elected leadership?
CMAR II I am not teaching people What is democratic and what is not, you are an adult and should know better.
I will ask you where did read it is democratic??
I suspect I’m being ambushed here, but, okay, I’ll play the straight man:
Article 2.1.b No law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy.
I mean, that’s like asking “where does the constitution say Kurdish is an official language.?”
LadyBird, the way things are reported is like if I happened to have blocked your car in a parking lot and you were angry with me because of that. Then the media the first thing they focus on is aha Nadia is shiia and you LadyBird are sunni that’s the reason you are angry at each other. No honesty at all at uniting us.
Its like a brainwashing propaganda thing going on 24 hours each day, and none of it is to unite us, it all goes about dividing us. And reminding non Iraqis to point out “why do you Iraqis hate each other? If there are 99 Iraqis with different religions that are living ordinary lives together in a suburb the focus is on the one man with extreme violent views as a representation of us Iraqis. And everybody in the media is hooked, Iraqis hate each other, they just don’t know it yet so we have to remind them each day, each bloody minute of their lives until they see it our way or shut up
.
Me: Layla I am so upset that you did not call me and cancel our meeting the other day; I waited for you.
Layla: Sorry Nadia but I were in car accident and broke my leg so I had to go to the hospital.
Nadia: I am so sorry to hear that, how are you know and what happened……
You know what LadyBird you could have this on the first page. Proof of Bush’s plan for Iraq.
President George Bush Discusses Iraq in National Press Conference
March 6, 2003
Before Bush’s war on Iraq he was planning on a federation. He and his team have been planning all along to divide us.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030306–8.html
It appears that democracy has become a front for corruption. It isn’t really about freedom. It’s more about a spoon-fed fantasy driven by propaganda, advertising, marketing, money, greed, and violence.
I can hardly believe that Bush is anything more than a puppet on a string. I wonder who the puppet master really is?
GUESTWORDS: By E.L. Doctorow
written 9.9.04 for the east hampton star
The Unfeeling President
I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life … they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.
He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing — to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.
A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills — it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners’ jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.
Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.
written 9.9.04 for the east hampton star
It’s not clear to me how you can say that there is no split among Iraqis when one major religious group has just caused the deaths of 640 members of another major relgious group mostly women and children. Much earlier the Iraqi jews were terrorised into leaving the country, you can’t get much more split than that. They want compensation from the Iraqis who forced them out. Why do you blame the Americans for everything. You have no credibility.
Why do you blame the Americans for everything. You have no credibility.
Well that’s a hard one :) Could it be that the USA illegally inavded another country for the purpose of stealing the oil and in the course of that over 123,000 people have lost their lives?
Are you a member of one of those left wing parties that the masses all over the world have disowned?
Crusader you seem to know very little about the outside world. Most Governments in the EU are socialist, even Blair’s party, the Labour party is socialist, although Blair himself seems to gone off the rails in anticipation of his new job with the Carlyle Group.
So no you are wrong about Socialism being rejected, it least it gives us some choice as opposed to the Republican Democrats or the Democrat Republicans. Actually you could do with a little socialism yourself particularly in regard to your health services.
Oh, sorry comrade, you are absolutely right as always comrade.
Michael
Crusader and Hank are same person.
The Pentagon “ponders” disinformation campaign, well what the hell have they been doing for the last 4 years?
Pentagon ponders disinformation campaign
http://atimes.com/terror/DB22Dk02.html
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON — When the Pentagon insists that one of its missiles hit senior al-Qaeda leaders meeting near Khost, Afghanistan, but local residents swear that the victims were peasants salvaging scrap metal, who is more credible?
When US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declares that Iran is actively helping al-Qaeda leaders to escape from Afghanistan but the Iranian government insists it is not, who is more credible?
The burden of proof will almost surely shift against the Pentagon if it goes through with plans for a new propaganda campaign that, according to Tuesday’s New York Times, might include “disinformation” to persuade public opinion overseas to back Washington’s war against terrorism.
The plans, which have provoked objections from the uniformed military as well as within the administration, appear to mark a new phase in a broader campaign to influence opinion particularly in the Islamic world and Europe, where opposition to any expansion of the war beyond Afghanistan is especially strong.
Top civilian officials in the Pentagon, together with Vice President Dick Cheney and his senior advisers, are eager to take the war to Iraq in hopes of ousting President Saddam Hussein but are opposed by the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which historically have run US propaganda campaigns. “The fact that the Pentagon is doing it has got to be an issue,” said former State Department spokesman Alan Romberg. “If it’s a covert action, using disinformation, it’s the CIA which has the mandate.”
Assembling the plans is the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), created several weeks after last September’s terrorist attacks in the United States. Headed by Brigadier-General Simon Worden, it consists of some 15 people and reports to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. The head of that office in turn reports to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, one of the administration’s best-known and fiercest anti-Saddam hawks.
The OSI also coordinates closely with the White House’s new counterterrorism office, run by retired General Wayne Downing, who in the late 1990s helped devise and sell a war plan against Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a coalition of Iraqi exile and Kurdish groups whose cause right-wing Republicans long have championed. It was no surprise, therefore, when the OSI contracted with the Rendon Group, a Washington-based lobbying and consulting firm retained by the Kuwaiti royal family to represent it during the 1990–91 Gulf crisis and later by the INC for its efforts to lobby the White House and Congress for millions of dollars in political and other support.
“I think it’s safe to say that this is an initiative of the Iraq hawks, who have had Saddam in their sights virtually from September 12,” said one official, who asked not to be identified.
The OSI “rolls up all the instruments within DOD [Department of Defence] to influence foreign audiences”, its assistant for operations, Thomas Timmes, a former colonel in the army’s psychological operations unit, told a recent conference. “DOD has not traditionally done these things,” the Times quoted him as saying.
According to Pentagon officials who spoke with the Times on condition of anonymity, the plans call for planting news items with foreign media organizations through sources that may not have obvious ties to the Pentagon and sending journalists and foreign leaders e-mail messages that promote US views or US targets without identifying the source as the military.
Under US law, neither the CIA nor the Pentagon may engage in propaganda activities in the United States or direct them at a domestic audience. The law was tightened in the mid-1970s after investigations revealed that the CIA planted stories abroad that were, in some cases, reprinted in the United States — a process referred to as “blowback”.
According to the Times account, which was clearly leaked by Pentagon officials who oppose the plan, Worden has very much the same kind of legally questionable operations in mind. “Information is much more global now and moves much more swiftly than it did 25 years ago,” said Thomas Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism here, who cited the Internet as one reason separating foreign from domestic media audiences no longer makes sense. “It would mean blowback, and that makes [these plans] much more complicated and either somewhat naive or disingenuous on the Pentagon’s part,” said Rosenstiel.
More than that, added Romberg, the Pentagon, if it goes through with the plans to use disinformation, risks losing its credibility. “People anticipate that the intelligence agencies do that; that’s part of the game. But it would be a very dangerous mistake for the Pentagon to do it.”
From virtually the outset of the counterterrorism campaign, the administration has been concerned with influencing foreign opinion. Secretary of State Colin Powell recruited Charlotte Beers, a retired top advertising executive, to become his undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Best known for developing the images of major products and US corporations, her primary focus has been to refurbish Washington’s image, particularly in the Arab world.
During the 1980s, the State Department housed a public diplomacy office on Central America that reported to the National Security Council and was later found by a Congressional investigative body to have engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda” operations when it, among other things, authored articles purportedly written by leaders of the Nicaraguan contras for publication in US newspapers. Several high-ranking members of the Bush administration contributed to that effort, including Otto Reich, who headed the office and is now assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, and Elliott Abrams, who was assistant secretary then and is now a top National Security Council aide to Bush.
A third, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, was to be named as Downey’s deputy at the White House anti-terrorist office but apparently fell victim to strenuous protests from Congressional Democrats who recalled that he and Abrams had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in the Iran-contra affair, only to be pardoned by then-president George Bush Sr.
The Rendon Group had a CIA contract to do media work on behalf of the INC in the mid-1990s, for which it was reportedly paid US$23 million, an amount that prompted a brief but inconclusive congressional investigation. It worked for the government in Panama during and after the 1989 US invasion “Operation Just Cause”, and performed similar services when US troops intervened in Haiti to restore exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Its most recent Pentagon contract, for just under $400,000, was to last four months, subject to renewal.
A spokesperson at Rendon told IPS on Tuesday she could confirm only that the group had a contract with the Pentagon and could provide no other information. Public affairs officials at the Pentagon held a closed-door meeting about the Times article on Tuesday but did not return phone calls seeking comment.
OK thanks Ladybird, I was thinking it was against the law of averages to get two people that stupid in a short while.
Michael, Ladybird and “Charles” are the same person.
Here’s some bad news for comrades Ladybug and Mikey from an Iraqi source:
These poll results were translated from the 29 August edition of the Iraqi newspaper Alhayat:
“Mr. Alhafith said to Alhayat newspaper: The poll included 3667 Iraqis, 53% men, the polls showed that 88% of those support holding the constitutional vote under current condition, while 10% were against for various reason. Some of the reasons were that Iraq is not a free country of its own sovereignty, the constitution will not meet their ambitions or that Iraq does not need democracy now and that the security situation will not allow the proper implementation of the constitution.
“As to how many polled support federalism, Alhafith said that 25% of those polled said they support federalism and consider it the preferred way to run the country. He added that 91% of those in favor of federalism were Kurds. While 58% prefer a central government with provincial administration. 17% refused to answer. Further, 45% want a central government, 23% prefer a union type government, 16% prefer a non central government and 13% refused to answer.
“As to the question of Islam being a main source of legislation. 42% support having Islam being the main source of legislation. 24% support having Islam be the only source of legislation. 13% support not having any law which conflicts with Islam. 14% support having Islam being only one of many sources of legislation, not the only one.
“As for women’s rights and women’s representation in the legislature. 84% support giving women full rights and benefits as men.”
The most salient point, I think, is that the vast majority of Iraqis agree that the negotiating and drafting process has played itself out, and it is time to vote.
The fact that some Sunnis have declined to sign on to the current draft has been played by the mainstream media as a defeat for the Bush administration and, somehow, an indictment of its policy in Iraq. Which causes me to wonder: if the United States were now to commission a group with representatives from all ideological, political, religious and ethnic groups to write a new constitution, do you think that they would achieve unanimity? Do you think that they would come anywhere near as close to consensus as the Iraqi negotiators did?
Is the USA a force for Good or Evil?
1. In December 2001, the United States officially withdrew from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, gutting the landmark agreement-the first time in the nuclear era that the US renounced a major arms control accord.
2. 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention ratified by 144 nations including the United States. In July 2001 the US walked out of a London conference to discuss a 1994 protocol designed to strengthen the Convention by providing for on-site inspections. At Geneva in November 2001, US Undersecretary of State John Bolton stated that “the protocol is dead,” at the same time accusing Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Sudan, and Syria of violating the Convention but offering no specific allegations or supporting evidence.
3. UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms, July 2001: the US was the only nation to oppose it.
4. April 2001, the US was not reelected to the UN Human Rights Commission, after years of withholding dues to the UN (including current dues of $244 million)-and after having forced the UN to lower its share of the UN budget from 25 to 22 percent. (In the Human Rights Commission, the US stood virtually alone in opposing resolutions supporting lower-cost access to HIV/AIDS drugs, acknowledging a basic human right to adequate food, and calling for a moratorium on the death penalty.)
5. International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty, to be set up in The Hague to try political leaders and military personnel charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Signed in Rome in July 1998, the Treaty was approved by 120 countries, with 7 opposed (including the US).
In October 2001 Great Britain became the 42nd nation to sign. In December 2001 the US Senate again added an amendment to a military appropriations bill that would keep US military personnel from obeying the jurisdiction of the proposed ICC.
6. Land Mine Treaty, banning land mines; signed in Ottawa in December 1997 by 122 nations. The United States refused to sign, along with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Egypt, and Turkey. President Clinton rejected the Treaty, claiming that mines were needed to protect South Korea against North Korea’s “overwhelming military advantage.” He stated that the US would “eventually” comply, in 2006; this was disavowed by President Bush in August 2001.
7. Kyoto Protocol of 1997, for controlling global warming: declared “dead” by President Bush in March 2001. In November 2001, the Bush administration shunned negotiations in Marrakech (Morocco) to revise the accord, mainly by watering it down in a vain attempt to gain US approval.
8. In May 2001, refused to meet with European Union nations to discuss, even at lower levels of government, economic espionage and electronic surveillance of phone calls, e-mail, and faxes (the US “Echelon” program),
9. Refused to participate in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-sponsored talks in Paris, May 2001, on ways to crack down on off-shore and other tax and money-laundering havens.
10. Refused to join 123 nations pledged to ban the use and production of anti-personnel bombs and mines, February 2001
11. September 2001: withdrew from International Conference on Racism, bringing together 163 countries in Durban, South Africa
12. International Plan for Cleaner Energy: G-8 group of industrial nations (US, Canada, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, UK), July 2001: the US was the only one to oppose it.
13. Enforcing an illegal boycott of Cuba, now being made tighter. In the UN in October 2001, the General Assembly passed a resolution, for the tenth consecutive year, calling for an end to the US embargo, by a vote of 167 to 3 (the US, Israel, and the Marshall Islands in opposition).
14. Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty. Signed by 164 nations and ratified by 89 including France, Great Britain, and Russia; signed by President Clinton in 1996 but rejected by the Senate in 1999. The US is one of 13 nonratifiers among countries that have nuclear weapons or nuclear power programs. In November 2001, the US forced a vote in the UN Committee on Disarmament and Security to demonstrate its opposition to the Test Ban Treaty.
15. In 1986 the International Court of Justice (The Hague) ruled that the US was in violation of international law for “unlawful use of force” in Nicaragua, through its actions and those of its Contra proxy army. The US refused to recognize the Court’s jurisdiction. A UN resolution calling for compliance with the Court’s decision was approved 94–2 (US and Israel voting no).
16. In 1984 the US quit UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and ceased its payments for UNESCO’s budget, over the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) project designed to lessen world media dependence on the “big four” wire agencies (AP, UPI, Agence France-Presse, Reuters).
The US charged UNESCO with “curtailment of press freedom,” as well as mismanagement and other faults, despite a 148–1 in vote in favor of NWICO in the UN. UNESCO terminated NWICO in 1989; the US nonetheless refused to rejoin. In 1995 the Clinton administration proposed rejoining; the move was blocked in Congress and Clinton did not press the issue. In February 2000 the US finally paid some of its arrears to the UN but excluded UNESCO, which the US has not rejoined.
17. Optional Protocol, 1989, to the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aimed at abolition of the death penalty and containing a provision banning the execution of those under 18. The US has neither signed nor ratified and specifically exempts itself from the latter provision, making it one of five countries that still execute juveniles (with Saudi Arabia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria). China abolished the practice in 1997, Pakistan in 2000.
18. 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The only countries that have signed but not ratified are the US, Afghanistan, Sao Tome and Principe.
19. The US has signed but not ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which protects the economic and social rights of children. The only other country not to ratify is Somalia, which has no functioning government.
20. UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966, covering a wide range of rights and monitored by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The US signed in 1977 but has not ratified.
21. UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948. The US finally ratified in 1988, adding several “reservations” to the effect that the US Constitution and the “advice and consent” of the Senate are required to judge whether any “acts in the course of armed conflict” constitute genocide. The reservations are rejected by Britain, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Estonia, and others.
Hank there’s no link for #20 or any confirmed source. It’s just more silly childish American propaganda.
Of course comrade, you are right as ever.Alhayat cannot exist if the party says it does not. I will reform my thinking forthwith,