On Sun, 09 Nov 2003 21:20:47 -0600, Stephen E Philion <philion at hawaii.edu> wrote:
> michael pugliese wrote:
> Why can't you see both the crimes of US imperialism (500,000+ in
> Indonesia in '65, 2.8 million Vietnamese casualties, 200,000+
> Guatemalans, the Contras, the coup on 9-11-73 in Chile, and everything
> else that has been on the ledger of the USG AND the crimes of US allies
> turned "rogue state" enemies like the Ba'athist death machine of Saddam
> Hussein et. al.?
>
> --I'd think a better ability is to discern how the US manipulates
> concerns about human rights to rationalise a war of choice and
> aggression. I don't see how one can view today's headlines about alleged
> "mass graves" discovered by the US military in Iraq...
>
> steve
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1021466,00.html "Mass graves to reveal Iraq war toll." Guardian...tool of Wolfowitz? Will they put alleged in quotes? Really, this makes me really pissed. Alleged Katyn massacre? Alleged My Lai Massacre? Alleged, "Sempul River Massacre, "??? http://www.apsanet.org/~illinois/ipsr/salvador.htm "Other community members were killed in one of the first major Salvadoran military operations in the war, the infamous Sumpul River massacre in 1980." (Monthly Review had a piece on this back then. The military killed hundreds that day and night.)
HRW, has many rad leftists that work as researchers and writers and policy wonks. Joe Stork who worked at MERIP. Just was interviewed by Pilger for his new doc. on Iraq & Afghanistan. Reed Brody, who wrote, ' Contra Terror in Nicaragua, " for South End Press in the mid-80's. George Black, who was an editor or writer for NACLA and has written for The Nation. See that Rethinking Marxism interview w/ these folks from HRW I've mentioned a bunch of times they ran tweo or three yrs. ago.
Of coarse, Bush, Perle, Wolfowitz will trumpet this. The freepers and WND and NewsMax and FoxNews viewers will lap it up. Does that mean that we, marxists, leftists, progressives, left-liberals, populists whatever we want to self define as, accept the parameters that Rightists and Centrists have a Monopoly on concern and agitation against truly fascist abuses and oppressive/repressive States?
Alleged? Steve, if you look at the HRW documentary evidence on the Anfal campaign against the kurds, they go back to the friggin' 80's when the Reagan and Bush admin. through the Commerce Dept. Agriculture, DoD and State where extending hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credits and arms and CBW to the Ba'athists. You write as if this was not known until the Bush 43 admin. found itself now w/ a burgeoning insurgency just as flexible and deeply rooted as the FMLN or the NLF.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ Preface A Note on Methodology Introduction
Chapter One: Ba'athis and Kurds Kurdish Autonomy and Arabization Exploiting Kurdish Divisions 1985-1987: Open War
Chapter Two: Prelude to Anfal The Chemical Threshold The Spring 1987 Campaign: Village Destruction andResettlement Early Uses of al-Majid's Special Powers Orders for Mass Killing Defining the "National Ranks": The Census of October 17, 1987
Chapter Three: First Anfal: The Siege of Sergalou and Bergalou, February 23-March 19, 1988 The March 16 Chemical Attack on Halabja The Fall of the PUK Headquarters
Chapter Four: Second Anfal: Qara Dagh, March 22-April 1, 1988 The Exodus from Qara Dagh Flight to Southern Germian
Chapter Five: Third Anfal: Germian, April 7-20, 1988 The Plan of Campaign: (1) Tuz Khurmatu The Plan of Campaign: (2) Qader Karam and Northern Germian The Plan of Campaign: (3) Sengaw and Southern Germian The Collection Points The Ambiguous Role of the Jahsh
Chapter Six: Fourth Anfal: The Valley of the Lesser Zab, May 3-8, 1988 The Chemical Attacks on Goktapa and Askar The Anfal Dragnet: East of Taqtaq The Shwan Area Zbeida's Story The Fourth Anfal Collection Points 18
Chapter Seven: Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Anfals: The Mountain Valleys of Shaqlawa and Rawanduz, May 15 -August 26, 1988 The PUK's Last Stand
Chapter Eight: The Camps The Popular Army Camp at Topzawa The Popular Army Camp at Tikrit The Prisoners from Bileh and Halabja The Women's Prison at Dibs A Prison Camp for the Elderly Deaths at Nugra Salman
Chapter Nine: The Firing Squads Muhammad's Story Ozer, Omar and Ibrahim Mustafa's Story Taymour's Story
Chapter Ten: Final Anfal: Badinan, August 25-September 6, 1988 Badinan on the Eve of the Final Anfal "Apples and Something Sweet": The Chemical Attacks of August 25 269 On-the-Spot Mass Executions The Fort at Dohuk and the Women's Prison at Salamiyeh
Chapter Eleven: The Amnesty and its Exclusions Dispersal of the Camp Survivors The Mujamma'a Dumping Operation The Fate of the Christians and Yezidis
Chapter Twelve: Aftermath Continued Village Clearances Continued Mass Killings: Yunis's Story Continued Mass Killings: Hussein's Story The End of the "Exceptional Situation"
Chapter Thirteen: The Vanishing Trail The Ba'ath Party: Alpha and Omega of the Anfal Campaign
Appendices Appendix A: The Ali Hassan al-Majid Tapes
Appendix B: The Perpetrators of Anfal: A Road-Map to the Principal Agencies and Individuals
Appendix C: Known Chemical Attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan, 1987-1988
Appendix D: Sample Mass Disappearances During Anfal, by Region
Appendix E: Glossary of Arabic and Kurdish Terms
-- Michael Pugliese