Comment by mighty aphrodite

Ignore this moron. “It’s Grandpa” would be dead by now if it was who it said it was. She is probably a Randian cultist as well. A very sick individual.

Comment by Death To Fascists #168

Yo DeathTF,

…but like (Ann/drew Coldsore) she’s a good right wing, inbred, TREASONOUS who*e…

…”that’s all we ask”…

-Tom Fried(notaman)-

The corporate media would have never asked it if it wasn’t posted on progressive Web sites for the past couple weeks.

Monday 12 June 2006

Fearful residents are now pouring out of Ramadi after the US military has been assaulting the city for months with tactics like cutting water, electricity and medical aid, imposing curfews, and attacking by means of snipers and random air strikes. This time, Iraqis there are right to fear the worst – an all out attack on the city, similar to what was done to nearby Fallujah.

It has always been just a matter of time before the US military would finally get around to destroying Ramadi, the capital city of al-Anbar province. After all, Ramadi is not far from Fallujah, and so similar to Fallujah both tribally and in their disdain towards the idea of being occupied, that many people in Ramadi even refer to Fallujah as “Ramadi.” I know many people from Ramadi who lost relatives and friends during both US assaults on Fallujah, and the level of anti-American sentiment has always been high there.

By now, we all know the scene when the US military in Iraq decides to attack an entire city … we’ve seen this standard operating procedure repeated, to one degree or another, in Haditha, Al-Qa’im, Samarra, parts of Baghdad, Balad, Najaf and Fallujah twice … so far. The city is sealed for weeks if not months, water and electricity are cut, medical aid is cut, curfews imposed, mobility impaired, air strikes utilized, then the real attack begins. Now in Ramadi, the real attack has begun.

Warplanes are streaking the sky as bombings increase, loudspeakers aimed into the city warn civilians of a “fierce impending attack,” (even though it has already begun), and thousands of families remain trapped in their homes, just like in Fallujah during both attacks on that city. Again, many who remain in the city cannot afford to leave because they are so poor, or they lack transportation, or they want to guard their home because it is all they have left.

Sheikh Fassal Guood, a former governor of al-Anbar said of the situation, “The situation is catastrophic. No services, no electricity, no water.” He also said, “We know for sure now that Americans and Iraqi commanders have decided to launch a broad offensive any time now, but they should have consulted with us.”

Today, a man who lives in Fallujah and who recently visited Ramadi told me, “Any new government starts with a massacre. That seems like the price that we Iraqis must pay, especially in the Sunni areas. Ramadi has been deprived of water, electricity, telephones and all services for about two months now. US and government forces frankly told people of Ramadi that they will not get any services unless they hand over ‘the terrorists!!’ Operations started last week, but it seems that the Marines are facing some problems in a city that is a lot bigger in area than Fallujah. (Ramadi also has at least 50,000 more residents than Fallujah.) Killing civilians is almost a daily process done by snipers and soldiers in US armored vehicles. The problem that makes it even more difficult for the Ramadi people than for those of Fallujah back in 2004 is that they cannot flee to Baghdad, because there they’ll face the government militia assassinations. Nevertheless, the US Army is telling them to evacuate the city. On the other hand, the government and the US Army made it clear that they will bring militias to participate in the wide attack against the city. The UN and the whole world are silent as usual, and nobody seems to care what is going to happen in Ramadi.”

Thus, the stage was set and now Iraqis brace themselves for yet another staggeringly high civilian body count in Ramadi. This, amidst recent news from the Department of Defense that over $19 million has been paid out in compensation by the US military in Iraq to families who have had loved ones killed by US troops. The average payout is $2,500 per body, and nearly half of the $19 million was paid out in the province of al-Anbar. Reflective of the drastically increased levels of violence in Iraq, the total amount of compensation payouts for 2005 is nearly four times what it was the previous year.

The fact that the 1,500 US troops who were recently brought into Iraq, specifically to Ramadi, went unreported by most, if not all, corporate media outlets didn’t come as a surprise to the residents of Ramadi, however, as street battles between troops and resistance fighters have been raging for months now.

The media blackout on Ramadi is already rivaling the blackout on the draconian measures employed by the military during the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, if not surpassing it. Thus far, the military have remained reluctant to allow even embedded reporters to travel with them in Ramadi. With each passing US assault on an Iraqi city, the media blackout grows darker – and with Ramadi, it is the darkest yet.

Most of what we have, aside from sporadic reports from sources inside the besieged city, is propaganda from the US military spokesman in Baghdad, Major Todd Breasseale, who only spoke of moving the newly arrived 1,500 troops in from Kuwait into positions around Ramadi. “Moving this force will allow tribal leaders and government officials to go about the very difficult task of taking back their towns from the criminal elements.”

Similar to Fallujah, thousands of frightened residents of Ramadi are fleeing the city, then being turned away from entering Baghdad. With no tents, food, or aid of any kind being provided to them by the military, which is a war crime, they are left with nothing but what they carry and no place to go. These refugees are now adding to the horrific statistic of over 100,000 displaced families within Iraq, the majority of whom are so as the result of massive US military operations which have a tendency to make entire cities unlivable.

Reports from sources within Ramadi for weeks now have been that US soldiers have been inhabiting people’s homes in order to use their rooftops as sniper platforms, innocent people are being shot daily, and people are confused – do they risk leaving and having nowhere to go, or risk staying in their homes and possibly being killed?

Hassan Zaidan Lahaibi, a member of the Council of Representatives in the Iraqi parliament, told reporters recently, “If things continue, we will have a humanitarian crisis. People are getting killed or wounded, and the rest are just migrating aimlessly.”

He could just as easily be describing much of the rest of Iraq, where the majority of people struggle to survive under the weight of an increasingly brutal occupation, US-backed death squads, sectarian militias, staggering unemployment and a devastated infrastructure

Comment by rick

Homophobia and aggression linked to latent or repressed homosexual urges. All republicans and conservatives are repressed homosexuals.

Boy are you Fu*k*d up. That is you and your rethug s. You can’t even read. I am for the bill of rights and aganist you right wing neocon pigs trying to add admendments to it. Like “not burning the flag(which I think is a bad idea) but should be protected as free speech. I also think free speech is in any language we should use. Don’t be so quick to jump on someone, that is what they do.

Mighty Haggis is a known liar.

Comment by mighty aphrodite

Complete and utter bullshit. Ignore this moron. “It’s Grandpa” would be dead by now if it was who it said it was. She is probably a Randian cultist as well. A very sick individual.

The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country’s population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. As in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale.

Since 1994, the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program, a project of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, has been studying these events to learn as much as possible about the tragedy, and to help determine who was responsible for the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. In Phnom Penh in 1996, for instance, we obtained access to the 100,000-page archive of that defunct regime’s security police, the Santebal. This material has been microfilmed by Yale University’s Sterling Library and made available to scholars worldwide. As of January 2006, we have also compiled and published 22,000 biographic and bibliographic records, and over 6,000 photographs, along with documents, translations, maps, and an extensive list of CGP books and research papers on the genocide, as well as the CGP’s newly-enhanced, interactive Cambodian Geographic Database, CGEO, which includes data on: Cambodia’s 13,000 villages; the 115,000 sites targeted in 231,00 U.S. bombing sorties flown over Cambodia in 1965-75, dropping 2.75 million tons of munitions; 158 prisons run by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime during 1975-1979, and 309 mass-grave sites with an estimated total of 19,000 grave pits; and 76 sites of post-1979 memorials to victims of the Khmer Rouge.

I do not see the word “communist” appear once in this brief description. They also do not mention the slaughter of Indonesian communists in 1965 and 1966. There is a link to the U.S. involvement in the slaughter in Cambodia, at least. But I doubt it’s a true unbiased picture. Better than most, probably.

The U.S. Is Even More Guilty Than Pol Pot

Written by a communist, but people need to hear both sides of the story. Most of the rabid anti-communists who have met and debated with Grover Furr have nothing but the utmost respect for him, though they may disagree with him.

Grover Furr’s Vietnam war page.

If I could do that, I would. And I wish I could.

Instead, I follow the path of least resistance. Mostly.

The coulter thing was a hoot, but draining. I hope that I demonstrated the dangers of “taking the bait.”

You don’t have the same problem.

It’s amazing how “factual” can still be misleading.

You see, normally you only hear exactly what you say, at most. Usually it’s just “emergency management has ordered a mandatory evacuation.”

Normally you only hear that an evacuation has been established, such as “there is a mandatory evacuation.”

My point, and I still think it’s valid, is that IF the president ordered it, then that in itself is newsworthy, since that should come from Chertoff, since FEMA “took over”.

No matter how you slice it, there is no reason to mention bush unless he ordered the evacuation, but then there should be news about that.

It was only in the news headlines they play at the top of the hour–that’s the only time I heard it attributed to bush. When the newscast itself spoke about the evacuations, they did not attribute it to someone, as per usual.

That is what we have now. The government is god/Bushco. The Bill of rights is now The bill of what we can’t do or think. Crap; can’t burn the flag anymore, gotta speak English, no more threesomes, gotta post the 15 commandments in my front hall, crap I have lost track.

Can’t wait for the civil war

To Krazny (and the rest of the government is god crowd), the middle is somewhere between Stalinism and modern socialism in Western Europe.