US Knight Ridder Exposes Systematic Torture, Murder Iraqi Sunnis; Writer Pays With Life

Jun 29, 2005
By Muhammad Abu Nasr, Free Arab Voice; Edited For Publication By JUS

Months after the stories began to surface in uncensored press, now American Knight Ridder newspaper has reported that so-called Iraqi security forces have been torturing and killing Iraqi Sunnis.

A story by Tom Lasseter and Yasser Salihee written for Knight Ridder was published on Monday 27 June 2005 and reported that “days after Iraq’s new Shi‘i-led [puppet] government was announced on April 28, the bodies of Sunni Muslim men began turning up at the capital’s central morgue after the men had been detained by people wearing Iraqi police uniforms.”

Stan Goff

That’s what I said. And to hell with the press’s sanctimonious lamentations over First Amendment rights. If they were so fucking committed to the press being some kind of democratic tripwire, they wouldn’t behave like such craven hucksters about virtually every real issue that comes along. In particular, they would be critical of themselves about the likes of propaganda hacks like Judith Miller.

By Bruce Dixon

Reposted from Black Commentator

Politicians are elected and selected, but mass movements transform societies. Judges uphold, strike down, or invent brand new law, but mass movements drag the courts, laws and officeholders all in their wake. Progressive and even partially successful mass movements can alter the political calculus for decades to come, thus improving the lives of millions. Social Security, the New Deal, and employer-provided medical care didn’t come from the pen of FDR. The end of “separate but equal” didn’t come from the lips of any judge, and voting rights were not simply granted by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. All these were hard-won outcomes of protracted struggle by progressive mass movements, every one of which operated outside the law and none of which looked to elected officials or the corporate media of those days for blessings or legitimacy.

By Danny Glover & Bill Fletcher, Jr.

The frustrations of the 2004 election results, and the disappointment with the Kerry Presidential campaign has led many Left and Progressive activists to seek new solutions to the quandary of the struggle for power in the USA. It is within this context that a new or revised approach to electoral politics must be considered. In this case, an approach that derives to a great extent from the Rainbow insurgency of the 1980s, including the 1984 and 1988 Presidential campaigns of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, as well as the initial building of the National Rainbow Coalition . The approach that Rev. Jackson offered—building an organization and campaign both inside and outside the Democratic Party—points progressives in the direction we should be advancing. In suggesting this approach, we do so recognizing the failure of the Rainbow movement of the 1980s to live up to its potential.

The China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s $18.5-billion bid has put Unocal back into headlines, a company whose pipeline politics, many suspected, may have been behind Washington’s Afghan War.

My opening remarks for the press conference at Quaker House, Fayetteville, NC, organized in response to George W. Bush’s speech on June 28, 2005, at Ft. Bragg:

An Interview with Clint Coppernoll
Counter-Recruitement: Preventing the Military from Getting More Youth for Their Wars

By KEVIN ZEESE

The Army and National Guard have been failing to meet their recruiting goals for the last four months. Summer is typically the time they have their greatest success in recruiting and they are counting on this summer to make up for their shortcomings in the previous months. They are increasing their efforts and making more promises to get America’s youth to sign up for war. As a result those of us who oppose the war need to step up our efforts in counter-recruitment as well. Below is an interview with a counter-recruitment activist from Washington State that provides directions on how to get started and documents to assist in your efforts.

Story of Inventing Insurgents Creates Allergic Reaction in the Press

The stark but informative site Cryptome.org is carrying a story with photos of how a Marine unit gathered the bodies of teenage boys from a soccer field, and rounded up nearby living teenaged boys, and posed them all with weapons that the Marines already had.

Everywhere I go, progressives are crying about the unfair capitalist media and how they don’t represent our point of view. This is like whining about the appetite that a hawk has for field mice. What, after all, would we expect?

Instead we need to be figuring out ways to discredit, overcome, and bypass these media.

By DAVE LINDORFF

I’ve heard some lame excuses, but what we’re hearing from American editors as to why they took a month to start letting Americans know about the Downing Street memoranda is beyond pathetic. These are the memos that are all over the British media, documenting the lying and duplicity of Bush crew in secretly planning to go to war against Iraq as early as the fall of 2001 or spring of 2002, while pretending to be seeking a peaceful solution.