Free Republic

Medea Benjamin's multiple Marxist Organizations make it somewhat difficult to find out what they're up to, with their "Iraqi Women" tour. I just found this itinerary listed on Global Exchange's website. Medea Benjamin, Code Pink, Global Exchange, Women Say No To War, et.al., have been peddling this tour as being voices of real Iraqi women. Not true, and I will add more about this in comments to follow on this thread. But since some of these events are tonight, I wanted to post this announcement quickly, in case some of you all wanted to attend and/or protest these events. My...

In a posting on the reformist website www.elaph.com, Iraqi reformist Dr. Abd Al-Khaleq Hussein, whose articles are regularly posted on the site, criticized the Iranian and Syrian regimes and their actions in Iraq and Lebanon. He wrote that these regimes were fascist in the true sense of the word, and that no stability, democracy, or economic prosperity would be possible in the region as long as they existed. The following are excerpts from his article:(1) The Syrian and Iranian Regimes are Fascist – Literally, Not Metaphorically "Some believe that describing the Iranian Islamic regime and the Ba'th Party's Syrian regime...

Baghdad, 19 Dec. (AKI) - The US authorities in Iraq have ordered the release from prison of 25 senior members of Saddam Hussein's former Baath party. The ex-officials will be transferred to neighbouring Jordan, one of the lawyers defending them told the Chinese news agency Xinhua. Many members and supporters of the former party are involved in the Iraqi insurgency. Under Saddam Hussein's rule, Iraqis could not reach senior positions in the government or in schools without being card-carrying members of the Baath party. But after the fall of the regime in 2003, the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer,...

CAIRO, Egypt - Five Islamic militant groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq, denounced the Iraqi elections as a "satanic project" that violates God's law and vowed to continue their war to establish an Islamic government in the country. But the Internet posting made no threats to disrupt Thursday's parliamentary elections, unlike previous statements before balloting in January and October, when militants warned they would attack polling stations to stop people from voting. ADVERTISEMENT The statement's authenticity could not be independently verified. If authentic, it was a rare instance of several of Iraq's militant groups joining together to announce their stance. "The...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Al-Qaida's second-ranking figure called on Iraqi insurgent groups to unite and claimed President Bush is deceiving the American people about successes against Islamic militancy, according to a videotape broadcast Wednesday. Ayman al-Zawahri, in a broadcast carried on the Arab television network Al-Jazeera, urged Iraqi Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen "whose hands were not tainted by Americans" should come together to fill "the gap that will be left by the Americans departure" from Iraq. "I call all mujahedeen groups to unite and work closely to achieve the coming victory" in Iraq, he said.

LONDON [MENL] -- Aides of deposed President Saddam Hussein, under the guise of Al Qaida fighters, have been leading the insurgency against the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Islamic sources said many of the Al Qaida-aligned cells that have appeared over the last two years stemmed from units in the Saddam military. The sources said Baathist operatives have adopted Islamic identities to exploit support among Muslims for Al Qaida. The Baathist strategy was formed during Saddam's rule, the sources said. They pointed to the "Return to Faith Campaign" directed by then-Iraqi Vice President Izzat Ibrahim Al Douri, which sought to curry...

Iraqi Kurdish Commentary Says 'Darkest Wave of Terror' Ahead The author of the following article, from Khabat, the daily newspaper published by Iraqi Kurdistan Democratic Party, expects to see a much darker wave of terror break out in Iraq now that the Iraqi constitution was accepted in the referendum. The terrorist groups of Al-Qa'da in Iraq and the remnants of Baathists had bet on the rejection of the constitution on 15 May 2005 by two thirds of the voters in the provinces of Anbar, Tikrit and Mosul. But as the Kurds and most Iraqis anticipated, it wads not so. It...

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is scheduled to visit the United States in November for a round of meetings with President Bush and other high ranking US officials. As the representative of the Yemeni people, Saleh deserves a great deal of respect and hospitality. Yet it has become increasingly apparent that the regime, under the total domination of President Saleh, is engaged in a wide variety of criminal activities to the detriment of regional stability and the Yemeni people themselves. Drug Smuggling: One regionally destabilizing regime activity is drug smuggling. A variety of illegal drugs are smuggled via the Indian...

[downloaded as a .pdf file from "Qanbar remarks"] The biggest danger to Iraqi citizens and the Iraqi government is terrorism.  Thus, the main task of the Iraqi army is not to fight wars with foreign countries, but to fight terrorism.   To defeat terrorism in Iraq, we need to establish a military force based on a doctrine that recognizes the nature of the enemy and what is required to defeat him.  We need to be prepared for a long term war.  Therefore, our necessary starting point is to understand the roots of terrorism in Iraq and the terrorists’ methods and means and how to defeat...

I don't understand what a Mexican flag has to do with our war in IraqLots of Mexicans, wow!Halloween?I do whatever for a pennyI'd suggest you to live in Cuba then

BAGHDAD, Sept 5 (KUNA) -- Iraqi security forces on Sunday arrested 73 militants and confiscated large amounts of weapons and booby-trapped cars in raids throughout the country, a statement by the government stated Monday. The statement said 30 militants were arrested in Tallafar after police forces returned fire that targeted a police station. A sniper was killed and a site for making explosives and containing gas-masks as well as light weapons ammunition was discovered in the same incident. The statement said security also arrested five terrorists in Diyala and Miqdadiyah and added four of them were members of a cell...

Ever since the beginning of major combat operations in Iraq in March 2003, the media have kept a precise count of U.S. casualty figures, which now stand at nearly 1,700 killed and more than 6,400 wounded. There's also been plenty of tendentious speculation about the number of Iraqis killed by coalition action, the purpose of which is to cast Iraq's liberation as an unmitigated horror for Iraqis. What has not been so carefully tracked, however, is the number of Iraqis killed by insurgent violence: the worshippers murdered as they pray in their mosques, the ranks of unemployed mowed down as...

Syria's ruling Ba'athist regime has launched a brutal crackdown on dissenters in the run-up to a landmark gathering of senior party leaders this week.Damascus's feared secret police have detained at least 14 opposition figures and have been blamed for the murders of two more. Last Wednesday, the body of Sheik Mohamed Maashuk Khaznawi, a prominent Kurdish leader, was found dumped on a street three weeks after he vanished. According to his family, he had been tortured. Hours later, Samir Qassir, a prominent Lebanon-based journalist, was killed when a bomb exploded in his car in Beirut. The streets of Damascus have...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - An Iraqi scientist killed in the U.S. invasion and now linked by arms hunter David Kay to possible nuclear weapons research was working on an advanced gun, not atomic bombs, fellow physicists say. They and eyewitnesses also say Khalid Ibrahim Sa'id was killed not when he tried to "run a roadblock," as asserted by Kay, but when a U.S. tank crew blasted his civilian car without warning on an open street. These accounts of the physicist's research and death, provided by 10 Iraqis and supported on key points by U.N. arms inspectors, challenge a core element of...

Recently, Wolf Blitzer of CNN was interviewing new Prime Minister Jalal-Talibani of Iraq about the situation that the newly formed government council is facing now that Iraq is a democracy. Blitzer asked Jalal-Talibani when he thought the United States would bring the troops home. Jalal-Talibani told him that he forsees that U.S troops will be in his homeland for at least another two years. When the pime mnister said this, the look on Blitzer's face seemed to say: "You must be kidding." He looked as if he couldn't believe his ears. But I exclaimed to myself: "Another two years!" That...

WITH paintbrushes, forensic specialists are carefully brushing away dirt from a human skull covered with sandy soil, one of 1500 believed to be buried in seven mass graves uncovered in this desolate stretch of the Iraqi desert, now patrolled by Australian troops. In a nearby trench dug by US investigators, a mass of black tangled hair gives a second skull an almost life-like appearance. A third skull appears to be screaming, mouth wide open. Skulls and bones, clothing and other belongings found in shallow graves offer valuable clues to investigators gathering evidence against Saddam Hussein and others from the former...

Charles Pasqua, a former French minister of interior, has emerged as one of the highest-ranking targets of the widening investigations into the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. United Nations, US and French investigators are examining Iraqi documents that show officials in Baghdad were instructed to transfer his lucrative oil allocations to an offshore company, to shield him from criticism. Mr Pasqua's alleged role has emerged as inquiries turn to the role of foreign governments in the corruption within the humanitarian aid programme. France and Russia, which opposed the 2003 invasion, have long been accused in the US of being too close to...

On the surface there would seem to be little to unite the Aryan racialists of the neo-Nazi movement with the terrorists of radical Islam. To the neo-Nazis, Muslims are almost all members of ``inferior`` races; and to the Islamic terrorists, the neo-Nazis are almost without exception either atheists or members of fringe quasi-Christian sects. But the reality is that there has been close cooperation between Muslim extremists and Fascists ever since the founding of the Nazi movement in the 1920`s. For all of their differences, Muslim extremists and Nazis have always been united by a common group of beliefs and...

Saywan Barzani, Kurdish representative to Europe: “Greater effort required from US and government against the Baathist network”.Paris (AsiaNews) -- Baathist “kidnappers, torturers and cutthroats” are the problem facing Iraq today. It is a question of “extremist terrorists” who want to “destabilize the country to the core,” and with whom “there can be no dialogue.” This according to Paris-based Saywan Barzani, Kurdish government representative in Europe, in an interview with AsiaNews. Barzani, nephew of Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, calls on Iraq’s government and coalition troops to increase efforts against a network of 3000 Baathist militants, and their...

Iraqi nationalists in recent days have gone after the US led coalition aircrafts that can be harmed with Russian made Surface to Air Missiles (SAM) and man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS). On Jan. 27, a U.S. Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter went down near the Iraqi-Jordanian border, and the next day a U.S. Army OH-58 observation helicopter crashed in Baghdad. On Jan. 30, a British Royal Air Force C-130 went down near the town of Taki while on its way to Balad Air Base from Baghdad International Airport (BIA). Additionally, in a news story, which U.S. Central Command denies,...