NO MASS RETURN OF TWO MILLION IRAQI REFUGEES

The lies keep coming out of the Bush administration and then repeated by the Bush administration parrot, FOX NEWS, about how many Iraqi refugees are returning to their homes.

FOX NEWS keeps getting away with pumping out lies about conditions in Iraq because it appears as though nobody in the media is willing to take on FOX NEWS and call them exactly what they are: LIARS.

But this blogger isn't.

We will continue to point out how FOX NEWS is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration, and their lack of reporting on the true conditions in Iraq is an insult to every man and woman serving in the United States milary and their families back in the United States.

Commentary by Bill Corcoran, editor and host of this blog.

Iraq: Propaganda Isn't Enough for Refugees to Return

By Patrick Cockburn, Independent UKPosted on February 11, 2008, Printed on February 12, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/76653/

To show that Iraq was safe enough for the two million Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan to return, the Iraqi government organized a bus convoy last November from Damascus to Baghdad carrying 800 Iraqis home for free.

As a propaganda exercise designed to show that the Iraqi government was restoring peace, it never quite worked. The majority of the returnees said they were returning to Baghdad, not because it was safer, but because they had run out of money in Syria or their visas had expired.

There has been no mass return of the two million Iraqis who fled to Syria and Jordan or a further 2.4 million refugees who left their homes within Iraq. The latest figures from the UN High Commission for Refugees show that, on the contrary, the number of people entering Syria from Iraq was 1,200 a day in late January "while an average of 700 are going back to Iraq from Syria."

The reasons people are not going back, despite new stringent visa regulations in Syria, are that they know Baghdad is very dangerous, the chances of making a living are small and there is a continuing lack of electricity and water.

Click on link above to read the full story.