BUSH SECRETLY MAKES PLANS TO KEEP TROOPS IN IRAQ AD INFINITUM

President Bush and the State Department have been secretly carrying on conversations with the Iraqi government in hopes of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq ad infinitum.

Even though Bush will be leaving office next January, he still wants to leave the next President saddled with the responsibility of overseeing 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Bush was hoping to build his legacy around Iraq, but when things started to go sour he began to look for ways to salvage the mess he and his administration had created.

Almost 4,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and another 30,000 are seriously wounded, and the latest survey by a British organization puts the Iraqi civilian death toll at ONE MILLION.

Despite all the chest-thumping by Bush and the right wingers like FOX NEWS that the "surge" has been a roaring success, the truth of the matter is violence continues throughout Iraq on a daily basis with no letup in sight.

As it stands now, Iraq will go down in history as the biggest foreign policy blunder ever undertaken by the United States of America.

Commentary by Bill Corcoran, editor and host of CORKSPHERE, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, the ONLY blog in America that is dedicated to telling the truth about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. wants right to hunt fighters in Iraq
By Lolita C. Baldor - The Associated PressPosted : Thursday Jan 31, 2008 20:20:59 EST

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/01/ap_iraq_foreignfighters_080131/

WASHINGTON — The United States, determined to prevent a resurgence of terror networks in Iraq, wants to preserve the right to hunt down top foreign fighters, as it negotiates a long-term security agreement with the Iraqis, according to a working draft described to The Associated Press.

And, while the agreement will not tie the U.S. to specific troop levels, officials do not rule out including some broad goals for the U.S. military presence there, reflecting the gradual transfer of security responsibilities to Iraqi forces.

The closely held draft document foresees a flexible agreement that would allow the U.S. and Iraqi governments to adapt and shift responsibilities as conditions change — a goal seen as critical to both calming resistance from Iraqis who want their country free of U.S. control and giving commanders the needed room to respond to changing violence levels.
In particular, it could adjust as attacks increase, decrease or shift to other areas, and as the provincial and national Iraqi governments progress and take on more security responsibilities.

Several officials with knowledge of the approximately 15 pages that outline the administration’s “developing positions” on the negotiations spoke on condition of anonymity, to describe private discussions.

As U.S. military and diplomatic leaders begin shaping their positions for the talks, it is also becoming clear that they will need to provide greater controls over U.S. contractors in Iraq, and that a blanket immunity from prosecution is not likely.

U.S. officials consider this one of the more sensitive issues and are expected to resist Iraqi pressure to make contractors subject to local laws. But, under the cloud of a shooting incident last year involving Blackwater Worldwide that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, the U.S. may need to provide better assurances that security contractors will be held accountable for their actions.

Any U.S.-Iraq agreement will face criticism from U.S lawmakers who say they will insist Congress review or approve it. Administration officials, who have just begun to brief lawmakers, insist the agreement will not rise to the level of a treaty, which must be approved by Congress.

Go back to link from the ARMY TIMES to read full account

CHILDREN SUICIDE BOMBERS ON RISE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

A new phenomenon is sweeping across Iraq and Afghanistan---children suicide bombers.

The growing number of children suicide bombers in both war zones has been ignored by the mainstream media in the United States.

U.N. Grapples With Suicide Attacks by Children

By Thalif Deen

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41008

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 30 (IPS) - The United Nations is expressing "serious concern" over the growing number of suicide attacks involving children, specifically in Afghanistan and Iraq."This is a relatively new phenomenon, and the United Nations has documented several high-profile cases of children involved in attacks," says a new 45-page report on "Children and Armed Conflict" released Wednesday.

Pointing an accusing finger at insurgent groups, including al Qaeda and its affiliated militias in Iraq, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the study says the United Nations is unable to get any commitments from any of these groups or organisations to end the practice. Asked for her comments, U.N. Under-Secretary-General Radhika Coomaraswamy, special representative of the secretary-general on children and armed conflict, told IPS that suicide bombings involving children raise a whole host of new issues. "We are grappling with the problem of how to deal with this phenomenon," she said. First, are suicide bombers "combatants" in the sense of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war?

Are potential suicide bombers "soldiers" and are these suicide bombers deemed child soldiers? she asked.

"Secondly, one purpose of U.N. Security Council resolution 1612 is to enter into action plans with military commanders and get child soldiers released. But how do we do that with suicide bombers or potential suicide bombers?" she asked.

Thirdly, those using suicide bombers, such as al Qaeda and others, are the least likely to engage in a dialogue with the United Nations about the release of children, as is done with governments and other insurgent groups accused of recruiting child soldiers

Go back to link to read the full story....

U.S. AIR FORCE BOMBS IRAQ--NOBODY CARES

THE IRAQ WAR---"THE FORGOTTEN WAR II"

The coverage of the war in Iraq has sunk to such a level that even the U.S. Air Force unleashing tons of bombs on a farming community in Iraq no longer is covered by the mainstream media in the United States.

The Iraq War has now officially become "The Forgotten War--II," a reference to the Korean War which was the first "Forgotten War."

The pack mentality of the mainstream press in the United States has been obsessing on the race for POTUS. The war in Iraq is now just a distant memory.

Bombs Away Over Iraq
Looking Up
Normalizing Air War from Guernica to Arab Jabour By Tom Engelhardt

http://www.tomdispatch.com/

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. ("Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.") Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:

"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.

"In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad."

And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:

"The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.'s."

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq."

Read More by clicking on link above.....

BUSH SAYS AL QAIDA ON THE RUN IN IRAQ, BUT FACTS DIFFER

UPTICK IN VIOLENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

This is getting to be so repetitious.

Everyday we watch as President Bush, Fox News, the parrot for the Bush White House, and most of the mainstream media see who can outdo whom in avoiding telling the American public what is really happening Iraq and Afghanistan.

If ever the phrase "out to lunch" was applicable it should be tagged on to the mainstream media in the United States who have taken a hike and refuse to report on the growing violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Below is just a partial list of what happened on Thursday, January 31 in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

For additional information on what is happening in Iraq, you can log onto my blog CORKSPHERE at http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ anytime and read all the latest news from the two war theaters where we have a total of 200,000 young men and women serving in the United States military.....Bill Corcoran, editor and host of CORKSPHERE


Thursday, January 31, 2008

War News for Thursday, January 31, 2008
Baghdad:#1: A roadside bomb went off near a police patrol near the Zaiyouna bridge in eastern Baghdad's Baladiyat neighborhood, damaging a police vehicle and wounding three policemen on board in addition to three passing civilians, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.Three policemen and three civilians were killed by a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in the Zayouna district of eastern Baghdad, police said

.#2: He said that another roadside bomb detonated near the Musa Bin Nassir fuel station in Karradah neighborhood in central the capital, wounding two civilians

.#3: The source quoted Iraqi police patrols as saying that a U.S. armored vehicle was set on fire before dawn when a roadside bomb struck the military patrol on the al-Qanat street that passes through al-Amin neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. The burning vehicle ignited several secondary explosions more than two hours after the roadside bomb attack, the source said.

#4: Two roadside bombs detonated near the convoy of an Iraqi deputy minister of electricity in eastern Baghdad on Thursday, wounding two bodyguards and a civilian, an Interior Ministry source said. "Two roadside bombs detonated simultaneously near the convoy of Salam al-Qazaz, deputy minister of electricity, in the al-Aqari neighborhood near the Palestine Street, wounding two of his bodyguards and a civilian," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity

.#5: In a separate incident, a roadside bomb went off in the al-Ghadeer neighborhood in eastern the capital wounding four people, the source added

.#6: One person was killed and four wounded when a car bomb exploded in Kadhimiya, a Shi'ite district in northwestern Baghdad, police said.Diyala Prv:

Baquba:#1: Clashes between gunmen and police in al-Tahrir neighbourhood, central Baquba left 2 civilians wounded#2: 2 women, ages 50 and 55, cousins to the governor of Diyala, Raad al-Mulla were abducted by gunmen who had put up a false checkpoint between al-Abbara area and Baquba city last night. Their fate remains unknown.Khamqeen:#1: Two policemen were wounded on Thursday morning in an armed attack by scores of al-Qaeda gunmen on a governmental building in Khanqeen in Diala, a police source said. "Dozens of al-Qaeda gunmen waged an armed attack at dawn on the headquarters of al-Saadiya district in Khaneqeen, northeast of Baaquba, injuring two policemen and causing some material damage to the building," the source, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq#2: Suspected al-Qaeda armed men set up a fake checkpoint on the road linking Balad Ruz to Mendli district in Khaneqeen city, where they stopped a civilian car and took its six passengers to unknown place," the source, who preferred anonymity, told Aswat al-IraqBasra:#1: Rockets slammed into the British base near the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Thursday, slightly wounding three British soldiers, a spokesman said.A spokesman for the Multi-National Forces in southern Iraq said on Thursday a British helicopter was destroyed when the British base at Basra international airport came under attack and two soldiers were wounded."News indicated that a British chopper had been destroyed at the Basra international airport were groundless," the spokesman told Aswat al-Iraq- Voices of Iraq- (VOI) over the phone.Spokesman for the Multi-National Forces in southern Iraq Captain Finn Aldrich had said earlier a British helicopter was destroyed when the British base at Basra international airport came under attack and two soldiers were wounded.Sulaiman Pek:#1: A severed head was found in the town of Sulaiman Pek, 160 km (100 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.Baiji:#1: A father and his son were shot to death by gunmen near al-Zaitoon restaurant in the north of Baiji. The man was a labourer from the village of Albu Jwari, 5 kn to the north of Baiji.

Afghanistan:#1: A suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing Helmand province's deputy governor and five other people, officials said. The bomber struck while people were praying inside the mosque in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said. Helmand's deputy governor, Pir Mohammad, was killed in the blast, said Nisar Ahmad, a provincial health official. The blast killed five other people and wounded 18 others, seven seriously, Andiwal said.

#2: A car bomb exploded next to an Afghan army bus in Kabul on Thursday, wounding four civilians and a soldier, a police officer said. The blast shattered the bus windows and badly damaged a passing taxi in Kabul's Taimani neighborhood, said police officer Jan Agha.

Casualty Reports

Pfc. Chris Parish recalled the day last June when the Humvee in which he was a gunner was struck by an explosively formed projectile as his convoy was traveling from one combat outpost to another in Iraq. "I would have bled out," he said, as the picture behind him showed the Humvee in flames, "if it hadn't been for my Battle Buddy. He obviously paid attention in the Combat Lifesaver Course."Pfc. Jesse Garza, who was riding in another vehicle that June day, rushed to the burning Humvee, tore off the canopy and pulled Parish to safety. "I was covered in blood and so was he. He laid me down in the back of a Bradley, applied pressure dressing and a tourniquet. In cutting off my pants legs, he cut into my right leg by mistake. I still have that scar. But I owe him my life." Shrapnel had shredded the 25-year-old soldier's left quadricep and hamstring and damaged his sciatic nerve. Parish has had 10 surgeries on his left leg with at least one more on the horizon.

U.S. Army Sgt. Joshua Cope lost his legs and full use of his right hand in a 2006 roadside blast in Iraq, is rehabilitating at Naval Medical Center San Diego.

And all this took place just on Thursday alone and yet President Bush goes on television and claims the "surge" is working.

SUICIDES WITH IRAQ WAR VETS AT ALL-TIME HIGH

The fallout from the war in Iraq continues to mount as a record level of veteran suicides were recorded for 2007.

Adding to the horrendous upsurge in veteran suicides is the alarming information that the Veterans Administration is woefully under-equipped and under-staffed to deal with all the mental health problems veterans are facing when they return from active duty in Iraq.

The Washington Post in its Thursday edition is reporting on an in-depth study that shows 121 Iraq war veterans committed suicide in 2007.

The Bush administration continues their swagger about how well the "surge" is going in Iraq, but the administration has failed miserably in dealing with the after effects of a war that has gone on now longer than World War II and is sending young men and women home without adequate mental health treatment for the alarming rate of suicide attempts that continue to soar.

This blogger was a Cpl. (E-4) in the Combat Engineers in the United States Army during the Korean War and personally saw several of my Platoon make an attempt at suicide. One young soldier drank a can of bore cleaner used to clean rifles and another tried to throw himself in front of an oncoming truck.

Nobody has any idea what war does to young men and women unless you have seen it firsthand.
The troops in Iraq are on their third and fourth rotations and the stress is enormous.
The Bush administration should hang their collective heads in shame for not taking better care of our wounded warriors returning from Iraq.

Bill Corcoran, editor of CORKSPHERE, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, a blog dedicate and devoted to telling the truth about what is happening to our soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Vet's battle with depression reveals effects of long tours, lack of resources

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22923548/

Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who was waiting for the Army to decide whether to court-martial her for endangering another soldier and turning a gun on herself last year in Iraq, attempted to kill herself Monday evening. In so doing, the 25-year-old Army reservist joined a record number of soldiers who have committed or tried to commit suicide after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

"I'm very disappointed with the Army," Whiteside wrote in a note before swallowing dozens of antidepressants and other pills. "Hopefully this will help other soldiers." She was taken to the emergency room early Tuesday. Whiteside, who is now in stable physical condition, learned yesterday that the charges against her had been dismissed.

Whiteside's personal tragedy is part of an alarming phenomenon in the Army's ranks: Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121 soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006.

Click on link above to read the full story of veteran suicides.

THE COST OF THE IRAQ WAR

We hear a lot of talk from the candidates for POTUS about what they are going to do about the Iraq war, but we seldom ever look at the cost of the Iraq war and what it could provide Americans back here in the United States.

Here is a short YouTube video that is breathtaking in just how much money is going to the Iraq war and what those tax dollars could purchase here in the United States.

It is worth watching.

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/2008/01/cost-of-war.html

ONE MILLION IRAQIS KILLED SINCE U.S. INVADED IRAQ

Iraq conflict has killed a million, says survey


30 Jan 2008 18:29:19 GMT 30 Jan 2008 18:29:19 GMT ## for search indexer, do not remove
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Source: Reuters

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L30488579.htm

Thanks to Lori Price of http://www.legitgov.org/ for this news tip.

LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling groups.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes.

The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 found 4.05 million households in the country, a figure ORB used to calculate that approximately 1.03 million people had died as a result of the war, the researchers found.

The margin of error in the survey, conducted in August and September 2007, was 1.7 percent, giving a range of deaths of 946,258 to 1.12 million.

ORB originally found that 1.2 million people had died, but decided to go back and conduct more research in rural areas to make the survey as comprehensive as possible and then came up with the revised figure.

The research covered 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Those that not covered included two of Iraq's more volatile regions -- Kerbala and Anbar -- and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a permit to work.

Click on link above for the full story.

IRAQI WOMAN: "IT WASN'T LIKE THIS UNDER SADDAM HUSSEIN"

Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone

http://tinyurl.com/2ccp6z


In this short clip from an HBO documentary, you hear an Iraqi woman crying out; "it wasn't like this under Saddam Hussein" as she is rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Baghdad after still another suicide bombing.

WILL FOX NEWS REPORT WHAT IS HAPPENING IN BAGHDAD, IRAQ?


FOX NEWS's Brit Hume, John Gibson, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly continue to tell their viewers how well everything is going in Baghdad since the "surge" was launched.

The quartet of so-called journalists from FOX NEWS have a penchant for not reporting on anything that is of a negative nature coming out of Iraq

So it will come as no surprise if FOX NEWS and their top anchors continue the pattern of providing FOX NEWS viewers with only "happy talk" about Iraq and not the reality of what is really taking place in Iraq, and especially Baghdad where the "surge" supposedly has brought about fantastic results according to FOX NEWS.

The fact that 17 bodies have been found in Baghdad---some of them beheaded---will undoubtedly slip by the eyes of Brit Hume, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson.

And FOX NEWS still has the audacity to call themselves "fair and balanced."

By Bill Corcoran, editor of the blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ a site which continues to bring updates on what is really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and not watered down White House "spin."

Iraqi security finds 17 bodies in Baghdad, some beheaded

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-01/29/content_7521848.htm
www.chinaview.cn 2008-01-29 21:00:19


Special report: Tension escalates in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Jan. 29 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi security forces found 17 unidentified bodies, some of which were beheaded, in the volatile province of Diyala on Tuesday, a provincial police source said.

"A joint Iraqi army and police force discovered 17 bodies believed to be killed by the al-Qaida in Iraq militant group in a rural area near the city of Miqdadiya, 90 km northeast of Baghdad," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Some of the bodies were beheaded and the others were intact, said the source, added that all the victims were shot dead.

The area, where the Iraqi security forces made the gruesome discovery, is a stronghold for Sunni Islamists of al-Qaida who fight the U.S. and Iraqi troops.

BUSH IGNORES WHAT IS HAPPENING IN IRAQ

President Bush is making plans to ask Congress for another $70 BILLION dollars to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush also is laying the groundwork for a plan to circumvent Congress and work out a deal with the Iraqi government so the United States military will be in Iraq for the next 50 or more years.

Meanwhile, Australia has announced they are pulling all their troops out of Iraq, and Great Britain has reduced their troop strength in Iraq from 7,000 to 2,000 with more cuts coming very shortly.

The United States, which has 160,000 troops in Iraq, and 30, 000 in Afghanistan, will be left carrying the bulk of the security operations in both countries.

Bush told Congress during his SOTU address Monday night that conditions were improving in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Apparently Bush can't read, or nobody is telling him about what is happening in both countries, or maybe he just enjoys telling lies to the American public.

He knows Fox News will never call him on it, but someone in the media should be reporting what is really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.

My blog CORKSPHERE http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ is devoted to telling the American public what the mainstream media is NOT telling them about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bill Corcoran, editor and host of this blog dedicated to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

ROCKETS SMASH INTO "GREEN ZONE" IN IRAQ
VIOLENCE IS ON THE RISE ALL ACROSS IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

Baghdad:#1: a bomb exploded on Saydun Street along the Tigris river in the centre of Baghdad as an Iraqi army patrol was passing, wounding six civilians and four soldiers.

#2: Three policemen and five passers-by were wounded in another bomb attack about 30 minutes later in the neighbouring district of Karrada. Two of the wounded later died in hospital

#3: In the Sunni district of Yarmuk in western Baghdad, three more civilians were wounded in an explosion3 civilians injured in an IED explosion in al-Dakhiliya neighbourhood, al-Yarmouk, south Baghdad at 10:30 am.

#4: two more people were hurt when a mortar round crashed on the eastern neighbourhood of al-Fadliyah.

#5: A female suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt hidden under her black robe at a checkpoint, killing at least two women and wounding five.A female suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt hidden under her all-encompassing black robe at a checkpoint Tuesday in Baghdad, killing at least two women and wounding five, police said. The attack occurred just after noon as women were being searched in a room before being allowed to enter a commercial street in the predominantly Sunni Amariyah neighborhood in southwest Baghdad, according to police officials.A bomb exploded at a checkpoint Tuesday in Baghdad, wounding five American soldiers and three civilians, the U.S. military said. Iraqi officials claimed it was a suicide bombing and said two people were killed. The attack occurred just after noon as women were being searched before being allowed to enter a commercial street in the predominantly Sunni Amariyah neighborhood in southwest Baghdad, according to a local police official and an Iraqi army officer. Navy Cmdr. Scott Rye, a U.S. military spokesman, said initial reporting indicated it was not a suicide attack but a bomb that was left at the checkpoint and later detonated. He said no deaths were reported, but five soldiers and three civilians were wounded. The Iraqi officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information, said a female suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt hidden under her all-encompassing black robe at a checkpoint. A policeman said two Iraqis were killed in the attack but the report could not be independently verified.

#6: An IED targeted an American military patrol in Canal St. east Baghdad. No casualyies reported.Meanwhile, eyewitnesses told VOI that an explosion occurred on the main road of al-Qanah Street in Zayouna neighborhood, eastern Baghdad, but nothing was known about the blast or its results. One eyewitness told VOI plumes of smoke were seen rising from the scene of the explosion, prompting security forces to seal off the area.

#7: In Baghdad, at least two Katyusha rockets landed inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses the Iraqi parliament and U.S. embassy, but there was no immediate indication of casualties or damage, police said. Diyala Prv:Muqdadiya:#1: Nine bodies and 10 severed heads were found on Tuesday in an abandoned field north of Baghdad in a region where U.S. and Iraqi forces are pressing ahead with offensives against al Qaeda forces. Police made the gruesome discovery of the bodies and severed heads in a field in Muqdadiya, 90 km (55 miles) northeast of Baghdad in Diyala, one of Iraq's northern provinces where U.S. and Iraqi forces are fighting Sunni Islamist al Qaeda.Iskandariya:

#1: One man was killed by gunmen who attacked his house in the town of Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.Taji:#1: Abbas Jassim al-Dulaimi, a tribal leader who organised a neighbourhood police unit in Taji, 20 km (12 miles) north of Baghdad, was killed by a bomb planted in his car on Monday, another Taji tribal leader said. Several of Dulaimi's bodyguards were detained after the blast, he said.Dalouiya

#1: Three elementary schoolgirls were killed and two others wounded when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off on Tuesday on a road that leads to their school in al-Dalouiya district, a police source in Salah al-Din province said."A home-made explosive charge went off on a road that leads to al-Inshrah primary school in al-Huweija al-Bahariya village, (5 km) west of Dalouiya, killing three girls and wounding two others while on their way to their school," the source, who preferred not to have his name mentioned, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of IraqSulaiman Pek:

#1: Gunmen attacked the convey of a local governor, wounding one of his gaurds, in a village near the town of Sulaiman Pek, 160 km (100 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.Tikrit:#1: A source in Tikrit University, who asked to remain unnamed, told VOI that security personnel at the Faculty of Law found an IED planted near the dean's office on Tuesday morning."The police were called and the IED was defused," the source said.Mosul:

#1: A suicide car bomber targeted a U.S. patrol Tuesday in Mosul, killing at least one Iraqi and wounding as many as 15, military and police officials said. The attacker on Tuesday detonated his explosives-laden car, wounding 10 Iraqi civilians about 11 a.m. in a predominantly Sunni area in eastern Mosul, a police officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information. The U.S. military said no American casualties were reported but one Iraqi had been killed and 15 wounded in the attack. The different Iraqi casualty tolls could not immediately be reconciled.

#2: In a separate incident on Tuesday near Mosul, 390 km (240 miles north of Baghdad, unidentified gunmen killed two off-duty police and wounded two others, police said. Al Anbar Prv:Fallujah:

#1: “Four missiles landed in the U.S. army base, located 3 km east of Falluja, on Tuesday,” a Falluja police officer, who requested anonymity, told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq - (VOI). He added, “The missile, launched from the southern and eastern sides of the base, landed in the middle of the base where billows of smoke were seen spiraling upward. ”The U.S. side was not available to comment on the incident. A short time later, four U.S. helicopters were seen hovering over Falluja for 25 minutes.Afghanistan:

#1: A missile destroyed a suspected militant hideout in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing 12 people inside, officials said. The air attack occurred after midnight in Khushali Torikhel, a village in North Waziristan, a tribal region bordering Afghanistan, intelligence and government officials in the region said. The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.

#2: In other fighting Tuesday, one soldier was killed in South Waziristan, a neighboring region along the border, the army said in a statement. Twelve insurgents were arrested in the area, it said.

#3: In another area of North Waziristan, four members of the paramilitary Frontier Constabulary were injured when assailants fired several artillery rockets at a military base, said a local intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Casualty Reports:

May 7, 2007, Baghdad: Lt. Col. Gregory Gadson is driving back from a memorial service..."Then I saw the flash, it was instantaneous out of the corner of my eye. We have a noise canceling intercom system with our vehicles, He was evacuated within 45 minutes by helicopter to a hospital in the Green Zone, and doctors needed 70 pints of blood to save his life. The injuries to both legs were severe, though. Both had to be amputated.

Sgt. Kenneth Lee Cate III, 23,-- A suicide bomber detonated behind me, shattering my right leg with shrapnel, and peppering my left thigh and back. And then when I tried to get up I was shot through the right arm. My injuries hurt most days, but only enough to left me know that they're there.

Cpl. Ryan Dion, 23, of Manchester, who had his right leg amputated at the knee after he was hit by a missile in Fallujah in April.

Staff Sgt. Terry Rathbun, 36, of Norwich, who was shot in the arm and face.

Sgt. Eddie Ryan, 24, of Ellenville, N.Y., who suffered a severe brain injury after he was shot twice in the head.

Army Staff Sgt. Jack Auble, 43, suffers from severe osteoporosis of the spine, bulging discs and compression fractures.

Spc. Garrett Summers, a Squad Automatic Weapon gunner from Eureka, Mo., was wounded in his left arm while on a combat patrol to counter improvised explosive device activity. Summers' platoon conducted a ground medical evacuation, and he arrived at a medical facility within 12 minutes of the attack. After suffering a wound from a 9 mm submachine gun during the enemy encounter. He is a Soldier from 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment has been awarded a Purple Heart Medal for an injury he suffered as a result of small-arms fire while on patrol in eastern Baghdad Jan. 1.

AUSTRALIA PULLING OUT OF IRAQ. BUSH WANTS $70 BILLION MORE FOR IRAQ WAR

The "coalition of the willing" fighting the war in Iraq has been reduced again as Australia has announced they are pulling their troops out of Iraq

Great Britain has already reduced their troop size from 7,000 down to 2,000.

That leaves the United States military to continue to fight the Iraq war with only a handful of small countries lending support troops.

Because most of the "coalition of the willing" have left Iraq, President Bush is planning on asking Congress for another $70 BILLION to fight the Iraq war.

By Bill Corcoran, editor of CORKSPHERE http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, the only blog dedicated to reporting on what the mainstream media no longer reports--the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Australia Announces Troop Withdrawal From Iraq

http://tinyurl.com/29gqca

1/29/2008 12:32:01 AM In a severe blow to US efforts to bring about stability in war-torn Iraq, Australia has announced its decision to withdraw its military troops from the country.



The announcement comes even as President George Bush in his last State of the Union address said that the al-Qaida is on the run in Iraq.Australian Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith conveyed his country's decision to US secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary Robert Gates and Vice President Dick Cheney on his first official visit to Washington since Kevin Rudd Government's election last year.



"We came to office in November last year with our longstanding commitment that we would withdraw our combat troops from Iraq by the middle of this year," Smith said."I advised the Secretary of State that when the current rotation from the Overwatch Battle Group is completed in the course of the first half of this year, those troops will be withdrawn," he said.

Bush to seek $70 billion in partial 2009 war funding


Tue Jan 29, 2008 4:40am IST
By Andrew Gray


http://tinyurl.com/22r4jl


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration will ask the U.S. Congress next week for $70 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and related operations for part of the 2009 fiscal year, the Pentagon said on Monday.


The new request is likely to set up another battle with Democrats who control Congress and are critical of President George W. Bush's handling of the Iraq war. Congress has yet to approve most of Bush's fiscal 2008 war funding request.


Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the administration probably will not submit another war funding request after this one before leaving office next January. That would make war funding one of the first issues facing the next president.


Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Congress has approved $691 billion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and such related activities as Iraq reconstruction, the Congressional Budget Office said last week.


Of the total, the CBO estimated that $440 billion had been spent on the war in Iraq.

VIOLENCE SPREADS ACROSS IRAQ AS BUSH PRESENTS "HAPPY TALK" SPEECH

President Bush delivered his last State of the Union Address Monday night and in typical fashion he praised how the "surge" was working in Iraq.

Bush apparently doesn't know how to read, or he has advisers who are shielding him from the true facts that are happening in Iraq.

On the very day Bush delivered his upbeat speech about Iraq, the following violent events took place in Baghdad and across Iraq and in Afghanistan. (see below).

Bush continues to LIE to the American public about what is taking place in Iraq, and his "happy talk" about Iraq is an insult to every woman and man serving in the United States military in Iraq who know things in Iraq are not what Bush says they are.

By Bill Corcoran, Chicago, editor of the blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, the only blog devoted to telling the REAL truth about Iraq and Afghanistan.

DEATH AND CHAOS GRIP IRAQ DESPITE WHAT PRESIDENT BUSH SAYS

The DoD is reporting the death of a soldier in the Brooke Army Medical Center on Friday, January 25th. Pfc. Duncan Charles Crookston was wounded in an IED attack in Baghdad on some unnamed date.The Jerusalem Post is reporting the deaths of five soldiers in a roadside bomb attack in Ninevah province on Monday, January 28th. No other details were released.Security incidents:

Baghdad:#1: A roadside bomb struck a minibus carrying a coffin and mourners to a funeral in the predominantly Shiite southeastern neighborhood of New Baghdad, killing three passengers and wounding five, a police officer said. The bomb apparently was meant for a police patrol but missed its target and blew up near the bus instead, a police officer said.

#2: Elsewhere in Baghdad, a fire swept through the top four floors of Iraq's Central Bank building before dawn, engulfing the documents holding room as well as several offices of key officials, another police officer said. The blaze broke out about 4 a.m. in the central bank governor's office, and an investigation was under way to determine the cause and extent of the damage, the officer said. He said firefighters had the flames under control after about four hours.

#3: The leader of a U.S.-backed neighbourhood police patrol was killed when a roadside bomb exploded near his car in northern Baghdad on Saturday, the U.S. military said.#4: Police found ( 2 ) unidentified dead bodies in Baghdad today : one was found in Doura ( south Baghdad) in Karkh bank .While the other one was found in Baladiyat ( east Baghdad) in Risafa bank.Basra:#1: At dawn , a roadside bomb targeted a foreign company’s convoy on Safwan road ( west of Basra) . Two security guards were killed in that incident who work for “ Heart” which is responsible for transferring generators from Kuwait to Iraq.Kirkuk:#1: Iraqi crude oil exports from northern Kirkuk oil fields to Turkey's Ceyhan port have been suspended since Friday, a shipping agent at the terminal said Monday. The agent said Kirkuk crude oil pumping to Ceyhan was suspended at 2000 local time Friday. Iraq only resumed the flow last Wednesday after a two-week suspension on a fault that occurred at one point of the export pipeline.

Mosul:#1: At least 60 people, mostly women and children, were killed and 280 wounded in a blast that rocked the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last week, the Iraqi Red Crescent said in a report.#2: The official spokesman for the Ninewa operations on Monday said that three civilians were wounded in clashes between U.S. forces and gunmen in southeastern Mosul."U.S. troops cordoned off Sumer neighborhood in southeastern Mosul, where clashes broke out in the region with gunmen, leaving three civilians wounded," Brigadier Khaled Abdul Sattar told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq#3: Five American soldiers were killed Monday in a complex attack in the northern city of Mosul, described as one of al-Qaida in Iraq's last strongholds, just days after a house explosion and suicide attack killed as many as 60 people there. Maj. Peggy Kageleiry, a U.S. military spokeswoman in northern Iraq, said the soldiers came under small arms fire and were hit by a roadside bomb in the city, which is the capital of Ninevah province.

#4: Two policemen were killed and two others were injured by unidentified gunmen in southern Mosul, a police source said on Monday. "Unidentified gunmen opened fire at four policemen on the Baghdad road in southern Mosul while on their way back home, killing two and injuring two," the source told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq - (VOI) under condition of anonymity.Al Anbar Prv:Fallujah:#1: The emergency police of Amiriyat AlFalluja ( west of Baghdad) had clashes with gunmen in the area from the afternoon till the sunset killing one of them ( Tariq Bdr Al-Deen ) the brain of the group which makes car and vest bombs .The police force asks for support from Aifan Sheik’s Sahwa in the area to control the situation.

Afghanistan:#1: One soldier was killed and nine were injured in Pakistan's tribal region by Afghanistan when security forces clashed on Monday with the militants loyal to a pro-Taliban commander blamed for the murder of ex-premier Benazir Bhutto, the military said. 'Heavy fighting is being reported in the surrounding areas of Kot Kai (in South Waziristan tribal district). In exchange of fire with miscreants one soldier embraced shahadat (martyrdom) and 5 others got injured,' said a statement issued by the Pakistan Army. Four more soldiers were injured in a firefight on Sunday night in Nawazkot area of the same district.

#2: Rebels also damaged a railway bridge using explosives, suspending railway services between the North-West Frontier Province capital Peshawar and Rawalpindi.

WILL BUSH MENTION 5 GIS KILLED TODAY IN IRAQ DURING STATE OF UNION ADDRESS TONIGHT?

Will President Bush mention the five GIs killed on Monday, January 28 in Mosul, Iraq when he gives the State of the Union Address tonight?

In a pigs eye. No way.

President Bush, like the mainstream media, no longer talks about the death of Americans in Iraq. They are cannon fodder and that is all.

Bush will more than likely be singing the praises of the "surge" and never mentioning the death of the five soldiers on Monday in Iraq or the fact there is violence all over Iraq.

Just how long is the press going to allow this hoax to continue?

Bill Corcoran, editor/host of the blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ dedicated to telling the truth about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because President Bush and media will not.

U.S. army says 5 soldiers killed in Iraq

http://tinyurl.com/2sy73a

Ninewa - Voices of Iraq
Monday , 28 /01 /2008 Time 9:05:45


Baghdad, Jan 28, (VOI) - The U.S. army said on Monday that five servicemen were killed when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

"Five U.S. servicemen were killed in Mosul this afternoon when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb," Abdellatif Rayan, media adviser for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq - (VOI) over the phone.

He did not add further details.

The official spokesman for the Ninewa operations had said earlier that three civilians were wounded in clashes between U.S. forces and gunmen in southeastern Mosul.

"U.S. troops cordoned off Sumer neighborhood in southeastern Mosul, where clashes broke out in the region with gunmen, leaving three civilians wounded," Brigadier Khaled Abdul Sattar said."They were rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment," he added.

The deaths bring the number of the U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to 3,940, according to statistics released by the U.S. army.

Of this number, 36 U.S. soldiers have been killed so far in January 2008.

November 2004, which witnessed fierce battles between U.S. forces and armed groups in Falluja city, Anbar province, remains the month that saw the highest U.S. death toll with 137.

April 2004 comes second with 135, followed by May 2007 during which 126 U.S. soldiers were killed.

UNTOLD FACTS OF CASUALTIES FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS

The Department of Veterans Affairs in conjunction with the Pentagon has released startling statistics regarding casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The full report can be read here:

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/files/VFCS/VCS_VA_Fact_Sheet_01-17-2008.pdf

There have been 263,909 veterans treated and of those treated 100,580 patients (or 38% of patients) have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. 52,375 patients were diagnosed with PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Equally disturbing is the fact that 245,034 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (34% of veterans) have filed a disability claim. 38,693 of those veterans filing a claim with the VBA (Veterans Benefit Association) are still waiting for an answer.

And here is a statistic bound to blow the mind of any caring American. The average wait time for the VBA to process a claim is MORE THAN SIX MONTHS.

U.S. POLICY IN IRAQ BACKFIRES

Very few people in the United States have even an inkling of what is taking place in Iraq because the media is fixated on the race for POTUS.

Reports of violence in Iraq are no longer carried on cable news stations, and even the deaths of American GIs no longer are mentioned.

The Iraq war has become the 21st century edition of "The Forgotten War" just like the Korean War was "The Forgotten War" in the 20th Century.

Two outstanding reporters who are determined not to allow the Iraq war be put on the back burner are Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail of IPS News.

These two outstanding journalists continue to bring their readers information that should be covered by the mainstream media in the United States but isn't anymore.

This blog is devoted to sharing reports with our readers from all over the Middle East about conditions on the ground in Iraq.

Here is just one of them that tells a story that you will NEVER see in the mainstream media in the United States.

By Bill Corcoran, editor/host of CORKSPHERE http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ the only blog in America dedicated exclusively to bringing readers information from both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

IRAQ: 'US the Biggest Producer of Terror'

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40924

By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*

BAQUBA, Jan 25 (IPS) - Broken promises have brought a dramatic increase in anti-U.S. sentiment across the capital city of Iraq's Diyala province.Many people in Baquba, capital of Diyala 40 km northeast of Baghdad, had supported U.S. forces when they ousted former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

But failed reconstruction projects and muddled policies mean the U.S. has lost that support. "The Americans based their strategy in Iraq on certain Shias here who have direct enmity with Sunnis and allegiance to Iran," resident Ayub Ibrahim told IPS. "This was the source of the gap between certain Shias which the U.S. backs, and certain Sunnis they back." Shias and Sunnis are different sects within Islam.

The U.S. has also alienated people through its policy of extensive detentions. Many believe that raids that lead to arrests are based on motivated information given to the U.S. military by Shia militiamen who have infiltrated the Iraqi army and police. "We never witnessed an attempt to arrest Shia people either by the U.S. army or the Iraqi police and army," resident Abdul Sattar al-Badri told IPS. Most people see no reasonable basis for many of the arrests.

In November the International Committee of the Red Cross said that around 60,000 people are currently detained in Iraq.

"The Americans occupied our country and put our men in prisons," Dhafir al-Rubaiee, an officer from Iraq's previous army told IPS. "The majority of these prisoners have been arrested for nothing other than for being Sunni. Every one of these prisoners has a family, and these families now have reason to hate Americans."

Others blame the lack of security and the destroyed infrastructure for the increasing anti-U.S. sentiment. "The lack of security is a direct result of the occupation," resident Abu Ali told IPS. "The Americans crossed thousands of miles to destroy our home and kill our men. They are the reason for all our disasters."

Another resident, speaking on condition of anonymity added, "We lived in need during the period of the Saddam government, but we were safe. We were compelled to work sometimes 20 hours a day to earn our living, but we were happy to see our children and relatives together." U.S. forces, he said, have ended all that.

Click on link above for the full story.

BUSHIES LIED 935 TIMES TO GET U.S. INTO WAR WITH IRAQ--NEW STUDY FINDS

For keen observers of the Iraq war, it should come as no surprise that the Bush administration LIED to the American public 935 times to get us into the Iraq quagmire.

From the moment President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their cohorts settled into the White House, they started making plans to invade and occupy Iraq. They were not going to be deterred.

Anyone like Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, were "swift-boated" by the Bush administration and their puppet FOX NEWS when Wilson revealed he found no evidence Saddam Hussein was buying "yellow cake" (uranium) from Niger, Africa.

The lies continued with Vice President Cheney claiming there had been a meeting between Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers, and loyalists to Saddam Hussein. The meeting never took place.

Cheney also kept saying there were weapons of mass destruction even after UN inspectors said there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Cheney also claimed the 9/11 hijackers had ties to Saddam Hussein, which later proved to be totally false.

Colin Powell, who was then Secretary of State, went before the UN and claimed the tubes shown in pictures were for rocket launchers when it later turned out they were storage cylinders.

All the while the Bushies were pushing for war with Iraq, the lies kept building up and not one person in the media challenged the authenticity of what the Bush White House was telling the press and the American public.

Now a study has revealed the Bush White House lied 935 time to get the United States into the Iraq war. Nearly 4,000 young Americans have died, and the latest injury figures are put at 29,000. There are estimates that upward of 600,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S. invaded Iraq.

There is no end in sight for the Iraq war and the "surge" has had little impact on the violence that continues on a daily basis throughout Iraq.

For additional proof of the ongoing violence in Iraq turn to CORKSPHERE http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, a blog devoted exclusively to the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars.

Bill Corcoran, Editor/host of http://corksphere.blogspot.com/

Study: Bushies Lied 935 Times to Sell Iraq Invasion

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, The Center for Public IntegrityPosted on January 24, 2008, Printed on January 27, 2008


http://www.alternet.org/story/74715/


President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.


On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.


It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.


In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.


Click on link above for the full story about how the Bushies lied 935 times to get the U.S into war with Iraq.

U.S. TROOPS EXPECTED TO BE IN IRAQ AT LEAST TEN MORE YEARS

Will it be ten years, or less than ten years? That is the question that is being asked about how long U.S. troops are going to be in Iraq.

If it were up to President Bush, U.S. troops would be in Iraq for next 50 or more years. Bush plans to circumvent Congress and work with the Iraqi government in establishing a virtual permanent U.S. presence in Iraq.

An Iraqi Minister claims the U.S. troops will be out of Iraq within 10 years, but that is only a guesstimate.

As we have been reporting for weeks on my blog, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, the security situation in Iraq is anything but stable.

There is also a great deal of talk that Iraq has failed to meet most of the 18 benchmarks putdown by the Bush administration. This could mean U.S. troops could be in Iraq as long as U.S. troops have been in Germany, Japan and Korea.

However, there is one major difference between our troops in Germany, Japan and Korea. They are not being fired upon night and day.

By Bill Corcoran, editor and host of CORKSPHERE: http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, a blog devoted entirely to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which the mainstream media no longer covers.

US troops will be gone within 10 years, says Iraqi minister

By Patrick Cockburn in BaghdadFriday, 25 January 2008

http://tinyurl.com/2df8mn

The Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, caused anger among Iraqis this month by saying during the New Hampshire primary that US military forces might stay in Iraq "for 100 years". Mr Zebari, asked by The Independent in Baghdad if the American army would be in Iraq in 10 years, said: "Really, I wouldn't say so."

Mr Zebari is much more confident than he was a year ago that "al-Qa'ida has been crushed, its network has been shattered" though it has not been completely eliminated. He says he thinks it dangerous if the Shia-Kurdish government, of which he is one of the most powerful members, does not pay and absorb into its own security forces the 70,000-strong Sunni Awakening movement which is fighting al-Qa'ida.

"That is the danger," said Mr Zebari. "The Awakening movement is not that well organised and it could be easily manipulated by al-Qa'ida." He added that it was an illusion that the Sunni political parties and their leaders "represent the Sunni community".

Mr Zebari originally made his name as the energetic spokesman and foreign representative of the Kurdistan Democratic Party during its long years of resistance to Saddam Hussein. He has been the most successful of Iraqi ministers since he was appointed in 2004, cultivating good relations with the US and Iran. Three years ago, insurgents tried to assassinate him using a vehicle packed with a tonne of explosives, including a naval torpedo, which was detected near his home before it was detonated.

For all Mr Zebari's optimism, Iraq remains an extraordinary violent country. Yesterday, a suicide bomber in a police uniform killed Brigadier-General Salih Mohammed Hasan, the chief of police of Mosul, northern Iraq's largest city. He had been inspecting the ruins of a building in which 20 civilians had been killed and 150 wounded in an explosion the previous day.

You can read the rest of this story by clicking on link above.

IF BAGHDAD IS SO SECURE, WHY IS ALL THIS HAPPENING?

The news media in the United States wants everyone to believe Iraq is a sea of tranquility.

However, violence is still erupting in Baghdad and across Iraq and the country is anything but secure.

WHAT HAPPENED SATURDAY IN BAGHDAD

Baghdad:

#1: One of the explosions was a roadside bomb that targeted a U.S. patrol in eastern Baghdad. A police officer said the blast site was sealed by American forces and there was no immediate way to detail damage or casualties. There was no immediate report of the incident from the U.S. military.

#2: Another police officer confirmed a mortar round hit the heavily protected Green Zone. The Americans did not report damage or casualties from that incident either. Both officers spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to release the information.

#3: Iraqi troops foiled an attempt to kidnap a businessman in central Baghdad and arrested the kidnapers, a security source said on Saturday. "Iraqi army troops managed, Friday evening, to arrest 14 gunmen clad in police while trying to kidnap a businessman in al-Andalus square, central Baghdad," the source told Aswat al-Iraq- Voices of Iraq- (VOI) .The source added that five police-like-4wheel drive vehicles were also confiscated during the arrest. The source provided no further details. On Friday, a security source told VOI that Iraqi forces detained 14 gunmen clad in police near al-Andalus square.

#4: Around 10 a.m. a roadside bomb targeted civilians near Al Shaab soccer stadium, injuring five civilians.

#2: One civilian was killed and another injured when an explosive device went off near the same city.

Robert Fisk: A lesson in how to create Iraqi orphans. And then how to make life worse for them

http://tinyurl.com/3x954u

Alas, the milk of human kindness does not necessarily extend to orphans from Iraq – the country we invaded for supposedly humanitarian reasons, not to mention weapons of mass destruction. For as their British uncle waited for them at Queen Alia airport, Jordanian security men – refusing him even a five-minute conversation with the girls – hustled the sisters back on to the plane for Iraq.

"How could they do this?" their uncle, Paul Manouk, asks. "Their mum has been killed. Their father had already died. I was waiting for them. The British embassy in Jordan said they might issue visas for the three – but that they had to reach Amman first." Mr Manouk lives in Northern Ireland and is a British citizen. Explaining this to the Jordanian muhabarrat at the airport was useless.

Western mercenaries killed their 48-year-old Iraqi Armenian mother, Marou Awanis, and her best friend – firing 40 bullets into her body as she drove her taxi near their four-vehicle convoy in Baghdad – but tragedy has haunted the family for almost a century; the three sisters' great-grandmother was forced to leave her two daughters to die on their own by the roadside during the 1915 Armenian genocide. Mrs Awanis' friend, Jeneva Jalal, was killed instantly alongside her in the passenger seat.

The Australian "security" company whose employees killed Mrs Awanis and her friend – "executed" might be a better word for it, because that is the price of driving too close to armed Westerners in Baghdad these days – expressed its "regrets". The chief operating officer of Unity Resources Group claims that she drove her car at speed towards the company's employees and that they feared she was a suicide bomber.

"Only then did the team use their weapons in a final attempt to stop the vehicle," Michael Priddin said. "We deeply regret the loss of these lives." He refused to identify the killers or their nationality. Westerners in Baghdad – especially those who kill the innocent – are once they are known, rich in regrets. But they are less keen to ensure that the bereaved they leave behind are cared for.

Click on link above to read the full account by Robert Fisk.

U.S. TROOPS HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ATTACK THAT KILLS SCORES OF IRAQIS

http://tinyurl.com/2c5z59

An investigation has been launched by the Iraqi government in conjunction with the U.S. military to determine what exactly took place in Mosul when several buildings were blown up by U.S. forces resulting in the deaths of over 50 Iraqi civilians and injuring close to 200.


Mosul, Jan 25, (VOI)- The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) said on Friday that it held Iraqi and U.S. troops responsible for the bombings in al-Zanjili neighborhood in western Mosul, which left hundreds of people killed or wounded on Wednesday.

Unidentified gunmen blew up a building in al-Pepsi street in Zanjili region in western Mosul.The Ninewa provincial council chief had said on Thursday that the attacks in al-Zanjili, western Mosul, on Wednesday have claimed the lives of 55 civilians and wounded 169 others.

"U.S. troops, in coordination with Iraqi security forces, detonated a building in al-Zanjili neighborhood using barrels of explosives," the AMS said in a statement.

Read the full story by clicking on link above.

FOUR UNTOLD STORIES OF HEROISM BY IRAQ WAR VETERANS

You have to go to local newspapers and television stations to find reports on wounded veterans from the Iraq war because the mainstream media feels the wounded veterans are not that newsworthy.

Here are just four accounts culled from the local media across the United States re veterans wounded in Iraq and their long upward rehabilitation fight.

They are worth reading. Also, bear in mind the mainstream media in the United States no longer feels their stories are newsworthy. They have bigger fish to fry like what is happening with Britney Spears.

By Bill Corcoran, editor and host of this blog dedicated to the brave young men and women who serve our country in Iraq and Afghanistan and who have been forgotten by the mainstream press in the United States.

A year later Steve Holloway remains determined to beat his paralysis. Three times a week, the 34-year-old war veteran spends an hour in the therapeutic pool at Palms West Hospital. So far, he's gained movement in a hamstring and toe, he's worked himself out of a crouch and, most strikingly, he can walk in the water. On his stomach — from his sternum past his belly button — is a sign of war. The deep, inset scar bisects his belly where surgeon after surgeon sewed him back together. There's a scar on his back, too. That's where the Iraqi insurgent's 7.62mm bullet exited Holloway's body, taking with it his ability to walk. the bullet struck on Jan. 15, 2007.

Jaime Antolec, 28, got blown up on the Fourth of July. A roadside bomb in Baghdad exploded under the U.S. Army sergeant's tank, shattering his ankles, and leaving him bloody and unconscious -- but alive.

Marine Sgt. Gregory Edwards took his last step Oct. 21, 2006. Alpha Company was on patrol in Ramadi, Iraq, conducting house-to-house searches when a hidden explosive detonated. The blast left Sgt Edwards a double amputee with a shattered left hand. He has endured 37 surgeries and a painful physical regimen that he devised himself to strengthen the tender stumps that end just above his knees.

David Corley was on patrol when he was shot in the jaw by enemy fire. The bullet shattered his jaw and exited through his neck. He was immediately flown to Germany and treated by a spinal surgeon. They discovered the bullet just barely missed a majory artery in his neck. Corley is now recovering in a San Antonio hospital. "He's not moving his right arm at all. He has a tremendous amount of pain in his shoulders, neck and arms. And of course he can't speak with a trake, and his jaw is wired together," his father Ronald said.

VIOLENCE AND DEATH ACROSS IRAQ

While the cable news outlets continue to obsess on the primaries or the late Heath Ledger or the latest craziness of Britney Spears, violence and death continue to spread across Iraq.

Everyone knows Fox News gave up reporting on the Iraq war months ago, but now CNN and MSNBC have also "spiked" all news out of Iraq.

The media justifies why they are not covering Iraq anymore because there is "Iraq Fatigue" in the United States and nobody wants to hear or read about Iraq anymore.

So that leaves bloggers like myself as the last bastion for telling the truth about Iraq and that is what we continue to do.

Below is what happened in Iraq on Thursday, January 24.

By Bill Corcoran, editor of CORKSPHERE http://corksphere.blogspot.com/

CHAOS CONTINUES IN IRAQ

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

Baghdad:#1: Also Thursday, a roadside bombing in central Baghdad killed two police officers and wounded six people, an Interior Ministry official said. The bombing, in Andalus Square, targeted a police patrol about 8 a.m. Three of the wounded were police and the other three were civilians.

#2: Two civilians were injured in an IED explosion in Ghadeer neighborhood east Baghdad around 4,00 pm.

#3: A civilian was injured in an IED explosion in Zafaraniyah district southeast Baghdad around 4,30 am.

#4: Police found three anonymous bodies in Baghdad today. Two bodies were found in Doura neighborhood in Karkh, the western side of Baghdad while the third body was found in Ma’amil neighborhood in Rusafa, the eastern side of Baghdad.

Mahaweel:#1: A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed one civilian and wounded two others in Mahaweel, 75 km (45 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.Iskandariya:#1: One body was found in the town of Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

Samarra:#1: Gunmen abducted seven oil tanker drivers on Wednesday near Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. The drivers were transporting oil from the Baiji oil refinery to western Anbar province.

Delouyia:#1: Gunmen on Thursday targeted a patrol of Delouyia awakening council in al-Mashru’a village, east of Delouyia, leaving four of the council members wounded”, Hameed al-Ahmed, the chief of Delouyia awakening council, told Aswat al-Iraq-Voices of Iraq (VOI).He added “the awakening council fighters and police forces, backed by U.S. helicopters, conducted a blitz in the accident site, clashing with the gunmen”.The tribal official pointed out “three gunmen were killed and two others arrested”.

Mosul:#1: A suicide bomber killed Nineveh province's director of police in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday, the U.S. military said. The bomber struck at the site of another deadly explosion the day before, killing the provincial police official and two other Iraqi officers, the U.S. military said. An Iraqi army soldier and a coalition forces soldier were also wounded in the attack.A suicide bomber disguised as a policeman killed Mosul's police chief and two other officers on Thursday as they visited the scene of an earlier blast, Iraqi officials and the US military said. They said five policemen and a journalist were wounded in the attack, which prompted authorities in Iraq's main northern city to impose an immediate and indefinite ban on vehicle traffic. "Two Iraqi police were killed in the blast, and one Iraqi army and one coalition force soldier was injured. "Brigadier General Salah, the provincial director of police, was also killed in the blast.#2: (update) The death toll from a bomb blast which obliterated a building in Iraq's main northern city of Mosul has risen to 34, with at least 217 people wounded, a provincial official said on Thursday. "More than 100 houses were damaged," Hisham al-Hamdani, head of the provincial council of Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital, told AFP.Al Anbar Prv:

Khalidiya:#1: Police forces killed a suicide bomber trying to blow up himself outside the police station in Khalidiya town of Anbar province on Thursday, a security source said.Afghanistan:#1: At least eight policemen were killed Thursday during an operation by U.S.-led coalition troops in central Afghanistan, an Afghan official said. The officers died in the village of Ghariban in Ghazni province during an operation that included U.S. ground forces and airstrikes, said the deputy head of Ghazni's provincial council, Habeb-ul Rahman. It was unclear whether Afghan troops also took part in the raid. Two other villagers, including a woman, were killed in the clash, Rahman said. It was not immediately clear how the officers and civilians were killed. Afghan police officials in Ghazni province, who spoke on condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to speak to the media, said that policemen appeared to have been killed by airstrikes, which also destroyed several houses.Nine police and two civilians were killed in an air strike by U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan, a provincial doctor said on Thursday, but the coalition said Taliban fighters had been killed. "Nine police, including an officer, two civilians, one of them a woman, were killed in the raid," he told Reuters. Five police were wounded, he said, adding they were in a vehicle patrolling the area when it was hit in the air strike.#2: Separately, a soldier from the NATO-led force was killed and two were wounded when a blast hit their vehicle in southern Afghanistan, an alliance spokesman said on Thursday. He did not identify the victims of Wednesday's attack.At approximately 1:40 p.m. local time (in Kandahar) today, one Canadian soldier who was part of a convoy was killed when the armoured vehicle he was in struck a suspected Improvised Explosive Device (IED), 35 km South-West of Kandahar City. Two Canadian soldiers were also injured.

#3: A Kiwi soldier has been injured in a helicopter accident in Afghanistan but the crash was not the result of enemy fire, according to the New Zealand Defence Force. The soldier, a member of the New Zealand peacekeeping force stationed in the troubled country, received minor injuries in the helicpoter crash, Captain Zac Prendergast said. No one else was injured in the accident.

Casualty Reports:

Brad Thomas, 22, suffered a serious head wound and other injuries Saturday from a roadside bomb during combat operations in Iraq. He was airlifted to American medical facilities in Germany, and his family remains hopeful he will pull through.

Specialist James Robak and his unit were searching homes in Sinsil, Iraq looking for bombs and Al Qaeda members. Along with Gaul, and four others, the explosion also killed sergeant first class Matthew Pionk of Eveleth, Minnesota. Robak was wounded as his sniper unit searched a suspected Al Qaeda compound for weapons. "I was on the roof along with two other guys, something set off the house and the whole house exploded," he said, "We lost six guys and four were injured and our [interpreter] was killed." Robak survived with a wounded leg and some minor cuts. For his father worrying comes with the job, but he was aware of the danger his son was facing before the explosion.

CURFEWS ARE A WAY OF LIFE IN IRAQ

The untold stories about life in Iraq continue to unfold while all the time the media in the United States looks the other way.

We reported on the electricity and gasoline shortages in a post yesterday on this blog, and today Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail are reporting on how curfews have become a way of life for Iraqi citizens living in Baquba.

Someday, hopefully, the American media will shed their "Iraq Fatigue" and again begin telling the American public the truth about Iraq.

However, until that happens we will continue to bring readers of this blog the inside story on life inside of Iraq.

By Bill Corcoran, editor and host of CORKSPHERE, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, a blog dedicated to telling the truth about Iraq and Afghanistan sans White House filters.



IRAQ: Under Curfew, This Is No Life

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40905

By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*BAQUBA, Jan 24 (IPS)

- Continuing curfew has brought normal life to a standstill in Baquba, capital of the restive Diyala province north of Baghdad.Through nearly three decades of rule under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis witnessed only two curfews; for the census in the 1970s and 1980s. Under the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, curfews are commonplace, enforced whenever the Iraqi government and U.S. military fail to control the situation on the ground. A curfew means all public utilities and services cease.

Life becomes frozen, and nobody is able to get to work. Factories and other utilities close, the wheel of the economy and development stops. "When the government imposes a curfew it does not think of those who have no salary," 39-year-old labourer Adnan al-Khazraji told IPS.

"A very large number of people like me rely on daily income for their living. On the contrary, government employees feel safe whether there is a curfew or not because at the end of a month they receive the salary regardless of stoppage of work." Members of the government and parliament receive big salaries, "and therefore they forget poor people at such times," Khazraji added. Not just economically, curfews have taken their toll psychologically as well.

In Baquba, 40 km northeast of Baghdad, there has been a curfew every Friday since 2005. "I feel imprisoned when I have to keep to my home," Salma Jabr, a resident of the city told IPS. "It is the only holiday that we have to do things like visits, shopping, travelling."

Click on link above to read full account of life under curfew in Iraq.

SUNNI MILITANTS VOW TO ATTACK U.S. TROOPS

GROUP IS OPPOSED TO U.S. SUPPORT OF ISRAEL

By Maamoun Youssef - The Associated PressPosted : Wednesday Jan 23, 2008 16:49:10 EST

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/01/ap_iraqthreat_080123/

CAIRO, Egypt — Five militant Iraqi Sunni groups said in a joint statement posted on the Internet that they were stepping up attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq in support of Palestinians in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

The statement announced the launching of what was described as the “Iraqi Resistance Campaign to Help Gaza” and accused President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of responsibility for the deteriorating situation in the coastal strip.

It described the American and Israeli leaders as “war criminals,” saying they sought to “cover up their dreadful failures in all fields.” It did not provide details of the planned attacks on U.S. troops.

The statement, which surfaced Tuesday on an Islamic Web site commonly used for militant messaging, also called on nations all over the world to “help lift injustice off the innocent Gazans.”

It also addressed the Gazans, urging them to be “patient and steadfast” because “victory was close,” adding that although the mujahideen, or holy warriors, were preoccupied with fighting “the enemies of God in Iraq, this will not deter us from helping our brothers (Palestinians) because the enemy is one and the victim is one.”

The Iraqi Sunni groups said to be behind the posting include the Jihad and Reform Front, formed last May and made up of the Islamic Army in Iraq, the Mujahideen Army and Ansar al-Sunnah, as well as the Islamic Movement of Hamas-Iraq and the Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance.

“We announce the launching of a military campaign ... to step up military action against the American partners of the Zionists and enemies of humanity,” said the statement. Its authenticity could not be independently verified.

The statement was posted before Wednesday morning’s dramatic break through a security barrier at the border between the small Gaza Strip, run by Hamas militants, and Egypt, after which tens of thousands of Palestinians poured into Egypt to stock up on medicine, fuel and food supplies.

Israel has been carrying out airstrikes and limited ground operations against Gaza militants. Last week Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, stopping shipments of fuel, medicine and food, but began easing the restrictions on Monday in the wake of an international outcry.

U.S. LED TROOPS KILL 8 POLICEMEN AND 2 CIVILIANS IN AFGHANISTAN

Is this anyway to win the "hearts and minds" of the Afghan people?

8 policemen killed in US Afghan raid



Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:43:22

http://tinyurl.com/24beyj

At least eight policemen and two civilians have been killed during an operation by US-led coalition troops in central Afghanistan. The officers died in the village of Ghariban in Ghazni province during an operation that included US ground forces and airstrikes, said the deputy head of Ghazni's provincial council, Habeb-ul Rahman. It was unclear whether Afghan troops also took part in the raid, AP reported. Two villagers, including a woman, were killed in the clash, Rahman said. Among the officers killed was the former provincial deputy police chief, he added.

WHY DOES MEDIA CONTINUE TO IGNORE WHAT IS HAPPENING IN IRAQ?

The media in the United States continues to ignore what is happening in Iraq. The following is a list of incidents in Iraq from Wednesday, January 23 ONLY and underscores how violent conditions still are in Iraq even though the media claims the "surge" has brought calm to Iraq.

VIOLENCE SPREADS ACROSS IRAQ

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

Wednesday: 54 Iraqis Killed, 170 Wounded

Explosion kills 17 in northern Iraq
A thunderous blast tore through a vacant apartment building in northern Iraq on Wednesday, killing at least 17 civilians and wounding more than 130 in adjacent houses just minutes after the Iraqi army arrived to investigate tips about a weapons cache. Rescue crews searched under toppled walls, collapsed ceilings and piles of debris tossed by the explosion that blew apart the empty building, which Iraqi authorities said was used by insurgents to stash weapons and bombs.

Baghdad:#1: Gunmen opened fire on an Iraqi army checkpoint in central Baghdad Wednesday, killing eight soldiers and wounding two, police said. The drive-by shooting occurred about 11 a.m. in the Bab al-Mudham district, a commercial area on the eastern side of the Tigris River in central Baghdad. Two other soldiers were wounded, a police officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information.

#2: More than 250 of the (Iraqi) interpreters working with the United States -- or with U.S. contractors -- have been killed.

#3: In the other attack, a roadside bomb exploded next to a girl's high school in Baghdad's western district of Amiriyah, wounding a 7-year-old boy who was passing by. But police said the target was an American patrol, not the school.

#4: Meanwhile, a roadside bomb detonated near a youth center in Zaafaraniya district in southeastern Baghdad without causing casualties, the source said.

#5: Gunmen killed the dean of Baghdad University's dental school while he was driving home from work on Wednesday, Iraqi police said. They said they found the body of Munthar Muhrej Radhi, who headed the country's premier dental school, in the front of his car in western Baghdad. He had been shot multiple times.

#6: Around 9 a.m., a roadside bomb exploded at Mansour neighborhood ( west Baghdad) at district 605. Some commercial shops damaged in that incident with no casualties recorded.

#7: Around 12.30, a roadside bomb exploded at Zafarania neighborhood ( south Baghdad) . No casualties reported.

#8: U.S. forces killed five gunmen and detained 16 others on Tuesday and Wednesday during operations in central and northern Iraq, the U.S. military said.

#9: Police found ( 4 ) unidentified dead bodies in the following neighborhoods : ( 3 ) were found in Risafa bank ( east Baghdad ) ; 1 in Shaab , 1 in Husseiniya and 1 in Binouk. While one was found in Sadiyah neighborhood in south Baghdad ( Karkh bank).Diyala Prv:#1: Three miles south of Baqouba, gunmen broke into a house and killed six men in a family for cooperating with the Iraqi army, an army official said. The men had given information on al-Qaida movements to local Awakening Council members, the official said. The attack took place in al-Abara village, an al-Qaida stronghold until Awakening Council members chased out the militants a few months ago.#2: The U.S. military killed 15 gunmen during operations on Tuesday and Wednesday north of Baquba, 65 km (45 miles) north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.#3: Wednesday afternoon, a roadside bomb targeted AlHay neighborhood ( downtown Baquba) near one of the quarters of the Sahwa council injuring two members of the Sahwa. Madaen:#1: Iraqi security forces killed 15 gunmen and wounded 20 others during the last seven days in Madaen, 45 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, the spokesman for the Baghdad security plan said.Kirkuk:#1: A car bomb killed five people and wounded three about 40 km (25 miles) from the northern city of Kirkuk, police said.Wednesday evening, a car bomb (BMW model) targeted a local market of Tuz Khurmatu (south of Khurmatu ) killing 5 people ( including one woman) and injuring 12 others ( including 2 women). Also 6 cars were damaged in that incident.#2: Wednesday, gunmen kidnapped two Kurds citizens on the way between Tuz Khurmatu and Suleiman Beck (south of Kirkuk ) .Those two kidnapped are from Kafri village ( 150 km south of Sulaimaniyah).Mosul:#1: Gunmen killed Aziz Sulaiman a professor at Mosul University on Tuesday in southeastern Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Bagdad, police said.#2: One body was found with gunshot wounds in eastern Mosul on Tuesday, police said.#3: Police forces on Wednesday morning defused two roadside bombs in Mosul without casualties, a senior security source said." The Ninewa police defused and remotely detonated two improvised explosive devices; the first in al-Masaref neighborhood in northern Mosul and the second in al-Nabi Yuonis in the eastern section of the city," Brigadier Abdul Kareem al-Juburi, told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq#4: Tuesday , a squad of the Iraqi army killed a gunmen in Mosul city and confiscated his car.#5: A bomb attack on a residential building in Iraq's northern city of Mosul on Wednesday killed and wounded up to 50 people, police said. Women and children were among the victims, police said. They did not have an immediate break-up of the dead and wounded. Witnesses said it was one of the biggest explosions they had ever heard in Mosul. Initial reports indicated gunmen had planted explosives in the building and then detonated the cache, police said.An explosion struck an apartment building in Mosul Wednesday shortly after police arrived to investigate a tip about a weapons cache inside, killing at least seven people and wounding 70, a spokesman said. The cause of the blast was unknown, but Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim al-Jubouri said it occurred about 4:30 p.m. after the arrival of Iraqi police forces.Afghanistan:

#1: A suicide bomber targeted a restaurant in Afghanistan's eastern Khost province Wednesday wounding two women besides killing himself, a local official said.

#2: In the latest violence, suspected militants attacked a military camp in the frontier region with rockets and small arms fire Wednesday, killing three soldiers and wounding several others, a military statement and security officials said. The strike against Razmak Fort in South Waziristan came a day after fighting that left seven troops and 37 militants dead.

#3: Islamic militants fired rockets at a military base in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing one soldier and injuring two others. Rebels fired rockets at Razmak Camp in North Waziristan, killing one solider and wounding two, the military said in a statement. The soldiers responded with artillery and mortar fire, but there was no word on any insurgent casualties, it said.

And the mainstream media in the United States continues to ignore all this as if it never happened.

THE "SURGE" CAN'T FIX THIS

MAINSTREAM MEDIA OVERLOOKS LACK OF ELECTRIC POWER AND GASOLINE IN STRIFE TORN IRAQ

The mainstream media in the United States measures everything in Iraq by the yardstick of how well the military "surge" is going.

Unfortunately, the problems which confront Iraq cannot be solved by the United States military.

Citizens of Iraq are suffering through long lines at the gasoline pumps and many Iraqis have little or no electricty.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government continues to flounder trying to find some basis for reconciliation.

Add to this grim scenario the fact that 160,000 U.S. troops are bogged down in Iraq with no signs of withdrawl in the forseeable future.

Iraq continues to be a human rights, political and military mess and the press in the United States have decided the Iraq war is not worth covereing anymore.


Desperate Iraqis Lack Fuel, Electricity

By Ben Lando, UPIPosted on January 23, 2008, Printed on January 23, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/74617/

You can't have one without the other, but with many of Iraq's power plants shut and refineries stopped, Iraqis have neither fuel nor electricity.

Iraq's Electricity Ministry is blaming the Oil Ministry for cutting fuel supplies and Turkey for ending electricity imports.

The Oil Ministry says continuous power to its refineries will lead to continuous supplies of fuel.

"We hear a lot of promises but we see nothing," Baghdad resident Amjad Kazim told Gulf News. Blackouts and long lines at the fuel stations are increasing as subsidized, state-controlled supplies run dry and the black market boosts prices.

In Baghdad's neighborhoods, black market auto fuel prices have jumped by nearly 20 percent in the past week, according to IraqSlogger.com.

Various U.S. government reports show fuel supplies are half the target and the ministries are unable to make the needed capital investment.

Iraq suffered from extensive power outages last summer, but reports showed steadily increasing capacity and delivery of electricity through the end of the year. Now there are widespread reports of two hours of power a day through much of the country.

"We have not had electricity for a week now and it took me about four hours to buy fuel for my car," east Baghdad resident Jaafar Dhia Ali said in a U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report.

Winter has set in reaching below zero temperatures in Baghdad alone.

AL-QAIDA STEPS UP ATTACKS IN IRAQ. STRATEGY SHIFTS TO "SOFT TARGETS"

WE REPORT. YOU DECIDE

By Bill Corcoran, editor and host of CORKSPHERE.

One of the more well-known cable news outlets in the United States, which shall remain nameless, has a motto that goes like this: "We Report. You Decide."

There is, however, one glaring problem with the cable news station's motto. In the case of the Iraq war they no longer "report" on the war so viewers are left with nothing to "decide."

In the spirit of being "fair and balanced," another motto of the nameless cable news station, we are bringing readers of this blog the "fair and balanced" reports of what is really taking place in Iraq.

Al-Qaida has changed their tactics in Iraq and it appears as though they are pinpointing "soft targets" like schools and funerals in an effort to undermine the notion that the "surge" is working and things are getting better in Iraq.

In the past few days there have been a number of suicide bombings aimed at schools and funerals. Below is an article on just one of them.

Finally, our stat counter indicates my blog is receiving a lot of visitors from overseas. I want to thank all of you and invite you to comment on any of the topics I post on this blog.

Suicide bomber attacks Iraqi school

By CHRISTOPHER CHESTER, Associated Press WriterTue Jan 22, 4:52 PM ET

http://tinyurl.com/3yvnyo

A suicide bomber pushing an electric heater atop a cart packed with hidden explosives attacked a high school north of Baghdad on Tuesday, leaving students and teachers bloodied and bewildered as insurgents appeared to be expanding their list of targets.

The bombing — one of two attacks near Iraqi schools on the same day — follows a wave of recent blasts blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq against funerals and social gatherings.

The trend points to the possibility that al-Qaida has shifted tactics to focus increasingly on so-called soft targets and undermine public confidence that things are looking better in the country.

The backlash also coincides with a U.S.-led offensive trying to uproot insurgents from strongholds around Baghdad.

In the suicide attack, the bomber posed as a shopper or merchant transporting an electric heater on a chilly winter day — an apparent attempt to deflect attention from the explosive-rigged cart.
The blast struck the front of a two-story schoolhouse in Baqouba about 8:30 a.m., half an hour after classes began. Panicked parents rushed to find out if their children were alive or dead.
A 25-year-old male bystander was killed and 21 people were wounded — 12 students, eight teachers and one policeman, according to a doctor at Baqouba General Hospital who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was afraid of being targeted by militants.

"I can't think of any reason to target students," said 15-year-old Mohammed Abbas, his wounded head in a bandage as his father stood near his hospital bed in Baqouba, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. "We did not expect that explosions would reach our school."

Go back to the link to read the full account.

IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN: "THE FORGOTTEN WARS"

It is hard to believe the mainstream media in the United States have collectively decided the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are not worth covering anymore considering what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan today (see stories below).

My blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ is the only blog in America devoted to the latest development in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As long as there is one U.S. military person in Iraq and Afghanistan, I will continue to bring to my blog readers what the mainstream media in the United States feels is stale news.

Bill Corcoran, editor and host of http://corksphere.blogspot.com/

THE WAR RAGES ON IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

The DoD is reporting a new death previously unreported by CENTCOM. Staff Sgt. Justin R. Whiting died in an IED attack in Mosul on Saturday, January 19th. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group. No other details were released.Security incidents:Baghdad:#1: One employee was killed and six others wounded when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off in southeastern Baghdad on Tuesday, police said."An IED planted by unidentified gunmen on the main road in Jisr Diala area, southeastern Baghdad, went off when a bus carrying transport ministry employees was passing by in al-Rasafa," a security source, who preferred not to be named, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq#2: A roadside bomb wounded a policeman when it hit his car in Mashtal district in eastern Baghdad, police said.#3: Four civilians were wounded when an explosive device detonated in Karrada, central Baghdad, on Tuesday, a security source said. “An improvised explosive device (IED) went off, while an Iraqi police patrol was passing by,” a security source, who requested anonymity, told Aswat al-Iraq -Voices of Iraq.#4: US Army announced on Tuesday that a chopper, which crashed in northern Baghdad, actually had an emergency landing due to a technical malfunction and not as a result of an attack. Two other choppers evacuated the crew of the busted chopper to a nearby military base and secured the area, Press Coordinator at the Multinational Force in Iraq Abdulatif Rayyan told KUNA. Earlier today, tribe leaders Sheikh Khalaf Al-Dulaimi and Talib Al-Majmaie told KUNA that the chopper went down in al-Nibaie area at noon Tuesday, and at the same time a search operation was conducted in near by villages, resulting in the arrest of 30 suspects.#5: Police found three bodies in Baghdad, one in Dora, in Saidiyah, in Baladiyat.Diyala Prv:"An Iraqi force, backed by Multi-National Force (MNF) troops, killed four gunmen and cleared the villages of Tal Tal and al-Jawr in the district of al-Muqdadiya within the continuing Operation Raider Harvest," the source, who refused to have his name mentioned, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq#2: A roadside bomb killed an employee of the Transport Ministry and wounded six others when it targeted their bus in Diyala Bridge, southeast of Baghdad, police said.Baquba:#1: A suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a high school north of Baghdad on Tuesday, wounding 22 people including teachers and students arriving for the beginning of the school day. Bystanders and at least one police officer were also wounded in the 8:30 a.m. bombing, according to a policeman who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals. The target of the latest bombing was unclear: The school is next to the provincial governor's office and a municipal building in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.#2: Iraqi security forces found the bodies of seven family members on Tuesday, all bearing signs of torture and shot execution-style, as they hunted al Qaeda fighters outside Iraq's volatile city of Baquba, police said. Police said the bodies were those of a father and his five sons as well as a nephew. The bodies, found in an orchard, had been identified by other family members, they said.Arab Jabour:#1: US and Iraqi ground forces edged cautiously towards an Al-Qaeda stronghold just south of Baghdad on Monday after the area was heavily bombed overnight, an AFP photographer said.Troops of the US 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment were using Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to inch forward and clearing roadside bombs with remote-controlled robots, said the photographer, who was moving with the unit. The US military said American warplanes overnight pounded suspected Al-Qaeda havens in Arab Jabour, 50 kilometres (30 miles) southeast of Baghdad.Amara:#1: A child was killed on Tuesday in a missile explosion in southern Missan, said a police said. "A seven-year-old child was killed this morning in a missile explosion, one that remained from the former Iraqi army in al-Magar al-Kabier district, south of Amara," the source, who asked to remain anonymous, told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq - (VOI). "The explosion took place when the child dismantled the missile to take the copper materials inside to sell it in the market," he explained.Touz Khormato:#1: Unknown gunmen believed to belong to al-Qaeda kidnapped two brothers in an area between Sulayman Bik and al-Qadaa districts near Touz Khormato, a police source said on Tuesday.Basra:#1: Two policemen were wounded in an armed attack in central Basra city on Tuesday morning, Iraqi police said. Unknown gunmen opened fire on a patrol car in downtown Basra's al-Tayaran square, wounding two policemen who were taken to the hospital and causing damage to the vehicle," an official security source, who requested anonymity, told Aswat al-Iraq, Voices of Iraq.Gunmen wounded three policemen when they opened fire on their car in central Basra, 550 km (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said.#3: local residents told the VOI that the British base in the city of Basra was rocketed on Tuesday night. "Four Katyusha rockets were fired in the direction of the British base," a witness from a residential compound in the airport environs said. "Sirens wailed more than once at the British base," he said. The British side could not be immediately contacted to learnShirqat:#1: Gunmen killed a bodyguard of Salahuddin province's police chief and wounded another in an attack on their car in Shirqat, 300 km (190 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. The police chief was not present at the time.Kirkuk:#1: The director of the al-Adala police station survived an assassination attempt with an improvised explosive device (IED) that targeted his motorcade in southern Kirkuk, an official police source in the city said. "An IED went off on Tuesday morning near the al-Adala police chief in the neighborhood of al-Wasti, southern Kirkuk, leaving no casualties," the source told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq – (VOI) on condition of anonymity.#2: A roadside bomb wounded two people when it exploded near their car in central Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.#3: Police found a woman body under Bardi Bridge north of Kirkuk after receiving a report from a citizen in the area. Police said there were no identification cards to identify the deceased and the body carried signs of two bullets.Mosul:#1: "An improvised explosive device went off on Tuesday morning near a police patrol in Mosul's southern area of al-Ghazalani, wounding a policeman and a civilian who were close to the scene of the blast," the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Aswat al-Iraq, Voices of Iraq.#2: a force from the Iraqi army's 4th brigade defused two explosive charges in Mosul's eastern neighborhood of al-Tahrir, but no casualties were reported on the army's side, the source added.#3: "An Iraqi army force stationed in Mosul managed to kill a gunman in the industrial region in western Mosul and confiscated weapons and ammunitions that were in his possession," Colonel Hagi Maher, deputy commander of the 2nd brigade of the Iraqi army, told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of IraqAfghanistan:#1: A Coalition CH-47 Chinook helicopter made an emergency landing in Sorobi District, Kabul Province, today around 4 p.m. after reporting a maintenance issue. There were no indications the landing was caused by enemy activity. The site has been secured by the passengers on board and a quick reaction force from a nearby base. There have been no reported injuries as a result from the emergency landing.#2: Militants have killed five Pakistani soldiers and wounded seven in the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border. Pakistani commanders said the militants suffered heavy losses in the attack on an observation post near the Ladha fort, which began an hour after midnight."The miscreants attacked the observation post of Ladha fort using heavy arms," a military spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, told Dawn Television. A spokesman for the militants denied heavy losses, saying 10 Pakistani soldiers were killed and 13 captured.Casualty Reports:U.S. Army Spc. Randy Moore, 23, was hurt Jan. 13 when a homemade bomb exploded near his Humvee in Iraq. Moore lost his left hand and sustained numerous shrapnel wounds, burns and injuries to both legs, his mother, Debbi McCloy, said. The improvised explosive device exploded near Moore's Humvee in heavy fighting around Baghdad. Moore was flown to the states last week and is in an undisclosed burn hospital.

IRAQ: A FAILURE TO THINK

INVASION OF IRAQ HAS TURNED INTO A HUMAN RIGHTS NIGHTMARE

By Jonathan Steele, Comment Is FreePosted on January 21, 2008, Printed on January 22, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/74454/

Five years after he launched it, George Bush's invasion of Iraq looks even more disastrous than it did at the end of the first year. Not only did it uncover no weapons of mass destruction. The invasion has led to a collapse in millions of ordinary Iraqis' personal security, producing a human rights nightmare and annual rates of killing that dwarf the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's three decades of power.

The damage to the United States has been enormous. As well as the loss of around 4,000 soldiers' lives, America's image and reputation in the Middle East have been severely harmed. For Bush and the neocons, the invasion has brought political defeat. Their project for Iraq to become a secular, liberal, pro-western bastion of democracy lies in ruins. The country is run by a narrow-minded group of Shia Islamists with close control over a sectarian army and police force. Many of them are linked to Iran.
As a result, Bush is now forced to run around the Arabian states along the Persian Gulf in an effort to build an anti-Iranian alliance and find a pretext for keeping a strategic presence in the region.

Sunni Arab revulsion at the murderous tactics of al-Qaida in Iraq, as well as the current "surge" of extra American troops, have helped to produce a welcome drop in al-Qaida's murders of Iraqi civilians and American forces, but it has to remembered that al-Qaida was never in Iraq before the invasion. A successful reduction in al-Qaida's power cannot outweigh all the harm Bush's war has caused to Iraqis.

Many critics blame the occupation's difficulties on a lack of planning, and a series of mistakes in the first few months, including the disbanding of the Iraqi army and failures to provide Iraqi with electricity and water. The line is summed up in the phrase "Winning the war but losing the peace."

But this assumes that a more intelligent and efficient occupation could have worked. It is an extraordinary notion. Like other Arabs, Iraqis have a long memory of US and British intervention in the Middle East, toppling regimes and controlling puppet governments, both to maintain an imperial presence and for the sake of oil. As soon as the Americans made it clear in mid-2003 that their occupation was going to be openended and without a timetable for troop withdrawal, Iraqi nationalists were bound to become suspicious and start resisting.

Yet L Paul Bremer, Iraq's American overlord, as well as his political masters in Washington, used the template of the occupations of Germany and Japan in 1945. They seemed to forget they were occupying an Arab country with a long history of anti-western resistance. Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile whose energetic campaigning against Saddam helped to push Bush into invading, realized the point with considerable regret last year when he said "the first and biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation."

Click on link above to read the rest of this story.

SUICIDE ATTACKS CHIP AWAY AT CALMER IRAQ

A series of suicide bomber attacks, including one yesterday just north of Baghdad that left 18 killed, has dashed any hopes that Iraq is well on the way to being a secure country.


Suicide bomber kills 18 north of Baghdad

http://tinyurl.com/2qgrjp

A suicide bomber apparently targeting a senior security official blew himself up inside a funeral tent Monday, killing 18 people in the latest of a series of deadly attacks chipping away at the notion of a calmer Iraq.

The U.S. military has repeatedly warned that the fight against insurgents is not over, and the bombing in a village north of Baghdad was the third in as many days in Sunni Arab areas thought to have been largely rid of al-Qaida militants.

RIGHT-WINGERS CAN'T COVER UP IRAQ'S DEATH TOLL CATASTROPHE

The following story dovetails with the story just below it by Dahr Jamail. It speaks volumes about how the American public has been misled by the mainstream media in the United States about the war in Iraq, the "surge" and casualties.

We will continue to update this blog with the latest information we receive from a wide range of reliable news sources which underscore how Americans are not being told the truth about both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Keep coming back if you are truly interested in what 160,000 young Americans face in Iraq and another 30,000 in Afghanistan.

Bill Corcoran, editor and host of this blog which is the ONLY blog in the United States devoted exclusively to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

http://www.alternet.org/story/74263/

By John Tirman, AlterNetPosted on January 21, 2008, Printed on January 21, 2008

RIGHT-WING MEDIA SHIFTS INTO HIGH GEAR TO SMEAR SURVEY FINDINGS

Now I know what Hillary Clinton meant, first hand, by that "vast right-wing conspiracy." When the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Sunday Times in London are going after you -- along with about 100 right-wing bloggers -- rest assured you've hit a nerve.

Or is it just Soros Derangement Syndrome at work?

More than two years ago, I commissioned a household survey of Iraq to learn how many people had died in the war. This topic had been virtually ignored by the news media and the U.S. government. It was important to know for at least three reasons. The first was to try to understand the nature of the violence there, which was steadily growing and creating a humanitarian crisis, possibly a regional conflagration. Second, it might tell us something about how and when to exit. Third, we needed to know for the sake of our national soul. What had we wrought?

So I contacted the people who had done a previous, largely ignored survey-top public health professionals at Johns Hopkins University. They had published a survey in October 2004 that showed 98,000 had died in the first 18 months of the war, which was greeted with disbelief and charges of politicizing science, and quickly dismissed.

I said: 'do a bigger survey to improve the accuracy, and I will make sure it gets the proper attention in the news media.' They did do a bigger survey, and I managed a public education campaign that permitted the results to be considered more broadly, results that estimated total deaths at 600,000 by violence after 40 months of war. The survey was published in The Lancet, the British medical journal. And get attention it did, roundly disbelieved and scorned by war supporters, but spurring a brief but intense debate about the human cost of the war.

Dozens of statisticians and other professionals scoured the study and its data to see if the methods and implementation were proper; a special committee at the World Health Organization was convened to review it, and the Lancet had also subjected it to rigorous peer review. The survey held up to this scrutiny, with quibbles and some lingering "should have done this" and "might have done that." But virtually every competent person agreed that the study provided the best estimate we have.

Go back to the link at the top of this story to read the rest of the story and what happened when the right-wing media pounced on the casualty statistics coming out of Iraq.

THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT THE "SURGE" FROM DAHR JAMAIL

Dahr Jamail is a world renowned reporter and author of the best-selling "Beyond the Green Zone."

In this latest dispatch from Iraq, Jamail paints an entirely different picture of "the surge" than what people hear on TV---especially FOX NEWS--and how it is being greeted by the Iraqi people.

Once again, the only place in America where you can find the truth about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is on my blog devoted entirely to the untold stories about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars instead of Bush White House "talking points."

Bill Corcoran, editor and host of http://corksphere.blogspot.com/

Police and Army Getting Sidelined in Iraq

Inter Press Service

By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail*

http://tinyurl.com/2l7wh4

BAQUBA, Jan 21 (IPS) - New military operations in Diyala province north of Baghdad have exacerbated a growing conflict between U.S.-backed Sunni fighters on the one hand and Iraqi army and police forces on the other.

The U.S. military commenced a large military operation Jan. 8 in the volatile Diyala province. Seven U.S. battalions led an offensive to push out fighters affiliated with 'Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia' from the area.

In the current operation, U.S., Iraqi, and local fighters have faced no serious resistance. U.S. military commanders admitted shortly after operations began that anti-occupation fighters were likely tipped off, and fled the area. But the operation has thrown up conflicts within the ranks.

"The military forces comprise the coalition forces, Iraqi police and army, and the popular forces (commonly called Kataib)," political analyst Akram Sabri told IPS in Baquba, capital of Diyala province. "It was found that the local forces are more truculent fighters who can always be relied on. This has made the coalition forces increasingly reliant upon these fighters to the extent that they will one day likely be joined to Iraqi police and army."
The Kataib Sabri speaks of are what the U.S. military calls "concerned local citizens". Most are former resistance fighters, now being paid 300 dollars a month to stop attacking occupation forces and to back them instead.

The groups, which the U.S. military claims are 82 percent Sunni, are viewed as a threat by the government in Baghdad led by U.S.-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The PM has said these groups will never become part of the government security forces. But while seen with suspicion at many places, these forces are also being welcomed in some.
Residents of Baquba, 40 km northeast of Baghdad, say the Kataib have brought a decrease in violence, and now enjoy a respect that the Iraqi army and police never have.

"The new prestige that Kataib enjoy has enraged the Iraqi police and army," an officer in the directorate-general of police, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "In one operation in a village near Khalis city 15 km west of Baquba, the directorate-general of police contributed just 20 men, while the Kataib fighters numbered 450. This shows how the Americans now rely more on the Kataib than on us."

Adding to the growing rift between the U.S.-backed fighters and government security forces is the increasing disgust with the mostly Shia-backed government in Baghdad.
"The coalition forces have to correct what they have done in bringing in such a sectarian government," a Baquba resident said. "The existence of militants is the result of the bad performance of the government and the ruling council of Diyala in particular. Enemies are created by injustice and unfairness.

"Everything has been affected by the lack of security, and the only reason behind that is the occupation and its feeble government," the resident said.

Residents remain leery of travelling outside of Baquba. Armed groups, often with unknown allegiance, control the roads.

Hded district, 10 km south of Baquba, is situated on the road to Baghdad. "The violence here has prevented people freely using the highway," 43-year-old bus driver Muhsin Muhamed Kareem told IPS. Government forces have failed to provide security, he said.
Muqdadiya area, about 30 km north of Baquba, has become a danger spot on the road to Sulaimaniya province in the Kurdish north. Many want to go there for business because Kurdish areas have better security, but militiamen from the Shia Mehdi Army often target Sunni travellers around Muqdadiya.

"The military operations which started two months ago cleared out the militants but did not control the militia because they are the police and army," a Muqdadiya resident said.
"A policeman at an official checkpoint in Muqdadiya asked a person, who was sitting beside me in my van, what his sect was," a frequent traveller on the route said. "Passengers know that the police behaviour is sectarian."

A resident of Aswad village, eight kilometres west of Baquba, told IPS that people have reason to support the U.S.-backed Sunni fighters rather than the government forces.
"The Iraqi army is hard-hearted with the people because they think that all the villagers are terrorists. People feel safer with the other forces."

DIDN'T THEY TELL US BAGHDAD WAS SECURE?

The mainstream media in the United States keeps telling the American public that the "surge" is working so well that Baghdad is now secure and people are out and about and enjoying life on the streets of Baghdad.

Well, not quite all the streets of Baghdad are secure.

It is a pity the MM in the U.S. has soldout their credibility to the Bush Administration and keep hiding from the American public what is REALLY taking place on the streets of Baghdad.

It is our job to be the ONLY blogger in the United States who has devoted himself to telling the public the truth about conditions in both Iraq and Aghanistan.

Daily and sometimes several times a day we bring readers of this blog updates on the latest from Iraq and Afghanistan culled from a wide assortment of international news organizations who feel the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are something worth covering unlike their counterparts in the American press who have abandoned the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. .

We hope you will keep coming back.

Bill Corcoran, editor and host of this blog.


Seven unidentified bodies found in Baghdad

http://tinyurl.com/yw4zfd


Baghdad - Voices of Iraq
Monday , 21 /01 /2008 Time 8:37:37


Baghdad, Jan 21, (VOI) - Iraqi police patrols on Monday found seven unknown bodies dumped in different parts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, a police source said."Police patrols found seven unidentified bodies in different areas of Baghdad, most of them were found in Baghdad's eastern side (Rasafa)," the source told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI)."Four corpses were found in different neighborhoods of Rasafa: one in each Ziyouna, Baghdad al-Jadida, al-Talibiya, and al-Maamel," he explained."Three bodies were found in al-Kharkh's neighborhoods: two in al-Salam and one in al-Doura," the source added."Most of the bodies found bore signs of gunshot wounds to different parts of the body, mainly to the head," he noted.

LISTEN UP, BILL O'REILLY

FOX NEWS' Bill O'Reilly, host of "The Factor," has been on a rampage claiming the homeless veterans story has been exaggerated. O'Reilly took most of his outrage out on Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, who said homeless veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were sleeping under bridges.

As usual, Bill O'Reilly has nothing to backup his claims the homeless veterans stories are overblown other than his big mouth.

Below is a story of just one Iraq veteran who O'Reilly says doesn't exist.

The stories of homeless veterans are much too long for this blog and so if you are interested in reading more about homeless veterans click on the tiny URL link provided below and read the whole account.

How does Bill O'Reilly keep getting away with lying?

The answer lies in the management of FOX NEWS who have shown in the past their disdain for the men and women serving in our military by relegating any news on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to a crawl along the bottom of the screen, and many times not even that.

Bill Corcoran, military veteran and former member of the U.S. Army Combat Engineers, and host of the only blog in the United States devoted to telling the truth about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: http://corksphere.blogspot.com/

New generation of homeless vets emerge


By ERIN McCLAM, AP National Writer Sun Jan 20, 7:57 AM ET

http://tinyurl.com/39cg29

LEEDS, Mass. - Peter Mohan traces the path from the Iraqi battlefield to this lifeless conference room, where he sits in a kilt and a Camp Kill Yourself T-shirt and calmly describes how he became a sad cliche: a homeless veteran.

There was a happy homecoming, but then an accident — car crash, broken collarbone. And then a move east, close to his wife's new job but away from his best friends.

And then self-destruction: He would gun his motorcycle to 100 mph and try to stand on the seat. He would wait for his wife to leave in the morning, draw the blinds and open up whatever bottle of booze was closest.

He would pull out his gun, a .45-caliber, semiautomatic pistol. He would lovingly clean it, or just look at it and put it away. Sometimes place it in his mouth.

"I don't know what to do anymore," his wife, Anna, told him one day. "You can't be here anymore."

Peter Mohan never did find a steady job after he left Iraq. He lost his wife — a judge granted their divorce this fall — and he lost his friends and he lost his home, and now he is here, in a shelter.

He is 28 years old. "People come back from war different," he offers by way of a summary.
This is not a new story in America: A young veteran back from war whose struggle to rejoin society has failed, at least for the moment, fighting demons and left homeless.

But it is happening to a new generation. As the war in Afghanistan plods on in its seventh year, and the war in Iraq in its fifth, a new cadre of homeless veterans is taking shape.

And with it come the questions: How is it that a nation that became so familiar with the archetypal homeless, combat-addled Vietnam veteran is now watching as more homeless veterans turn up from new wars?

What lessons have we not learned? Who is failing these people? Or is homelessness an unavoidable byproduct of war, of young men and women who devote themselves to serving their country and then see things no man or woman should?

Click on the link above to read the rest of this story and about other homeless vets who Bill O'Reilly of FOX NEWS says is only a pipedream.

3 GIS BECOME AMERICAN CITIZENS ON EVE OF DEPLOYMENT TO IRAQ

With all the hoopla over illegal aliens in the news as well as dominating much of the political debates for POTUS, this story from the Army Times puts a whole new look on the immigration issue.

Three Oklahoma National Guard soldiers will be getting their citizenship just before they are deployed to Iraq.

(Editor's comment: I wonder if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, both of whom avoided military service, will have anything to say about the three GIs who will be given their citizenship just in time to leave for Iraq).

Bill Corcoran, editor and host of the only blog in the United States devoted to untold news about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: http://corksphere.blogspot.com/
.
Soldiers earn citizenship on eve of deployment

The Associated PressPosted : Sunday Jan 20, 2008 17:33:37 EST

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/01/ap_citizenship_080120/

TULSA, Okla. — Three Oklahoma National Guard members in El Paso, Texas, preparing for deployment to Iraq have become United States citizens.
Jamaica native Sgt. Gareth Wilson, 27; Spc. Oyewale Hotonu-Oyerinde, 28, from Nigeria; and Tulsan Sgt. Adam Ngotngamwong, whose father is from Thailand and whose mother is Canadian, all gained their citizenship on Friday, expedited by their service with Oklahoma’s 45th Infantry Brigade.

An executive order signed by President Bush shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks means the normal wait required for legal residents of the U.S. is waived for those serving in the military, along with the application fee.

“I just wanted to go to Iraq as an American citizen,” said Tulsan Ngotngamwong, 25, who previously deployed in 2004 to Afghanistan. “It makes it closer to home. You are fighting for your country, instead of just being a legal citizen.”

Wilson also is from Tulsa, and Hotonu-Oyerinde is from Oklahoma City.
The pending deployment of the three to Iraq underscored for them the opportunity to get their citizenship on the fast track.

Initial headquarters elements of Oklahoma’s 45th are deploying over the next few days to their pending mission in Baghdad, Iraq. After a farewell formation Sunday, the unit will begin shipping its soldiers first to Kuwait for processing, then to Baghdad’s International Zone.

Read the rest of the story by clicking on link above from the Army Times.

JUST ANOTHER QUIET SUNDAY IN IRAQ---NOT

WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE?

Me or the lying eyes of the mainstream media who claim Iraq is a desert oasis of tranquility in the Middle East?

What you read below spells out what is REALLY happening in Iraq and not the baloney TV, especially FOX NEWS, and the rest of the press are feeding the American public.

Bill Corcoran, host of this blog devoted to telling the truth about conditions on the ground in Iraq where 160,000 brave young Americans are hunkered down caught in the middle of never-ending sectarian violence that has gone on for five years, or longer than World War II.

Just another quiet Sunday in Iraq----NOT.

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/


BaghdadOne civilian killed, two injured by roadside bomb in Zayounah neighborhood, eastern Baghdad.Mortar attack near the Saidiyah amusement park injures two.

BaladMortar round hits Ashoura observances, killing three, injuring 18, according to a source. The hospital reports the toll as 3 killed, including 2 children, and 20 wounded. Reuters gives the death toll as 5.

NassiriyahCommander of the police commandos, Lieutenant colonel Abdel Amir Jabbar, dies of injuries sustained in Friday's fighting with the Ansar Ahmad al-Yamani sect. VoI reports that several senior security officials were killed in the fighting. (This is apparently the same group which is elsewhere identified as Soldiers of Heaven, although there is dispute over whether they are connected to the Soldiers of Heaven who fought a major battle with U.S. and Iraqi forces a year ago. I would definitely like to see clarification of this, but the nature of the group remains murky. -- C)

Near FallujahSuicide bomb attack on the estate of Sheik Aeifan al-Issawi, a leader of the Anbar Awakening Council, kills six, including four of his security guards. Issawi is unharmed.Reuters has an entirely different description of what might be the same incident: A suicide bomber killed six people in a town south of Falluja where people were celebrating the release of a man from U.S. military custody, local officials said. The bomber walked into the man's house and blew himself up. This is so different that it seems conceivable there were two suicide bombings in Falluja. Certainly the leader of the Anbar Awakening Council would not have been in U.S. custody

.BasraFighting continues between security forces and members of the Soldiers of Heaven group, but on a lower level than previously. Iraqi police source says 20 people were arrested, no police casualties.Rocket attack on Coalition base at the city's airport injures two Czech soldiers. Injuries are not serious.

MosulTwo injured in attempted car bomb attack on a police checkpoint. Police say they shot the driver, implication is this caused the bomb to detonate prematurely.

Buhrez (South of Baquba)Joint U.S.-Iraqi force kills an al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, according to an anonymous security source. (It is odd that so many of the sources in the security forces speak anonymously. Maybe they don't feel very secure. -- C)

SamarraDrive-by shooting kills a Baathist leader.Separately, gunmen attack Awakening Council militia members, resulting in the deaths of three attackers, according to a source. Note that the Awakening Councils seldom report suffering any casualties of their own in these battles. -- C

TELL ME AGAIN ABOUT HOW SECURE IRAQ HAS BECOME

All the citizens of the United States ever hear about Iraq anymore is just how secure the country has become.

Huh?

If Iraq is so secure then how come these events happened Sunday in Iraq in Baghdad and Falluja, two of the Iraqi cities that the mainstream press says are "secure?"

Bill Corcoran, host of this blog devoted to telling the TRUTH about Iraq and not the blowback TV, especially FOX NEWS, and the print media are dumping on unsuspecting Americans.


Blast kills civilian, wounds two in eastern Baghdad

Baghdad - Voices of Iraq
Sunday , 20 /01 /2008 Time 8:48:12

http://tinyurl.com/3dzbpd


Baghdad, Jan 20, (VOI)- At least one civilian was killed and two others were wounded on Sunday morning when a roadside bomb went off in eastern Baghdad, a police source said.
"An explosive charge went off, this morning, on the main road in Zayounah neighborhood, eastern Baghdad, killing a civilian and wounding two more," the source, who requested anonymity, told Aswat al-Iraq- Voices of Iraq- (VOI)."Security forces sealed off the area and rushed the wounded to a nearby hospital," he added.SK


Suicide bombing leaves 10 casualties near Falluja

Anbar - Voices of Iraq
Sunday , 20 /01 /2008 Time 8:48:12

Anbar, Jan 20, (VOI) – Five civilians were killed and five others wounded in a suicide bombing attack that targeted a gathering of well-wishers on the release of a detained local resident near Falluja on Sunday, a police officer in Anbar province said.
"The suicide bomber blew himself up inside the house of Hadi Hussein in Amiriyat al-Falluja on Sunday afternoon," the officer, who asked not to have his name mentioned, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq – (VOI).

Good News From Iraq: Opium Agriculture Takes Off

By Patrick Cockburn, Independent UKPosted on January 18, 2008, Printed on January 20, 2008

http://tinyurl.com/2enw93

Editor's note: According to UN estimates, 92 percent of the world's heroin originates in Afghanistan, the other theater in Bush's "War on Terror."

The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.
Afghans with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north-east of Baghdad.

At a heavily guarded farm near the town of Buhriz, south of the provincial capital Baquba, poppies are grown between the orange trees in order to hide them, according to a local source.

The shift by Iraqi farmers to producing opium was first revealed by The Independent last May and is a very recent development. The first poppy fields, funded by drug smugglers who previously supplied Saudi Arabia and the Gulf with heroin from Afghanistan, were close to the city of Diwaniyah in southern Iraq.

The growing of poppies has now spread to Diyala, which is one of the places in Iraq where al-Qa'ida is still resisting US and Iraqi government forces. It is also deeply divided between Sunni, Shia and Kurd and the extreme violence means that local security men have little time to deal with the drugs trade. The speed with which farmers are turning to poppies is confirmed by the Iraqi news agency al-Malaf Press, which says that opium is now being produced around the towns of Khalis, Sa'adiya, Dain'ya and south of Baladruz, pointing out that these are all areas where al-Qa'ida is strong.

The agency cites a local agricultural engineer identified as MS al-Azawi as saying that local farmers got no support from the government and could not compete with cheap imports of fruit and vegetables. The price of fertilizer and fuel has also risen sharply. Mr Azawi says: "The cultivation of opium is the likely solution [to these problems."

To read the full account about the mushrooming poppy growth in Iraq click or cut and paste on the link at the top of this story.

IRAQ SCHOLARS RELUCTANT TO RETURN

While the mainstream media obsesses on the South Carolina primary, the fallout from the Iraq war continues to bury Iraqis in ways that are totally overlooked by the press in the United States.

The most recent study reported on CORKSPHERE, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, a blog by Bill Corcoran devoted exclusively to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, has to do with all the academics who are refusing to return to Iraq because security conditions are anything but secure.

IRAQ'S SCHOLARS RELUCTANT TO RETURN

The continuing shortage of academics is damaging higher education throughout the country.

By Zaineb Naji in Baghdad (ICR No. 243, 18-Jan-08)

http://www.iwpr.net/?p=icr&s=f&o=342062&apc_state=henpicr

Zahra, a doctoral candidate studying immune-system diseases, shook her head in disappointment when she saw the list of professors who were supposed to review her thesis.Three had fled the country. While one promised to attend her defence of her thesis, another was unable to make it because of the security situation. Zahra, 40, who received her PhD two months ago, did most of the work on her own.

She doesn’t blame her professors – one left Iraq after receiving a bloodstained bullet in an envelope together with a note which read, “You’re wanted because you are a scientist.”

“I thought that the good security situation might encourage the professors to return to Iraq,” said Zahra, who did not want her real name to be used. “On the contrary, some are still fleeing the country, and the universities are still suffering from a shortage of lecturers.

”Widespread threats against Iraqi university staff have all but stripped the country of its intellectual core, particularly in Baghdad. According to the country’s higher education ministry, 240 lecturers were killed from 2003 to October 2007.

Approximately 2,000 academics have fled the country, according to Tariq al-Bakaa, a former minister of higher education who served under the 2004 government of the then prime minister Ayad Allawi.

Most have fled to Jordan, Gulf States, Libya and Syria, where some have established the Syrian International University for Science and Technology. Many others cannot find work or are struggling to make ends meet in their countries of refuge, but are wary of returning.

ARMY DESPERATE FOR TROOPS SENDS WOUNDED BACK TO IRAQ

SOLDIERS WITH MINOR INJURIES
SENT BACK TO IRAQ

01/19/08 AP: U.S. army, short of soldiers, sends troops with minor injuries to Iraq
Seventy-nine injured soldiers were pressed into war duty last month as the U.S. Army struggled to fill its ranks, but most were assigned to light-duty jobs within limits set by doctors, two Army leaders said.

While the mainstream media goes into complete overkill on the South Carolina primary and the Nevada caucus, there is more proof that conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan are deteriorating.

The success of the "surge" is a figment of the mainstream media's imagination and especially the cheerleader for the Bush White House, Fox News.

And there is more proof the American public are being sold a bill of goods on the success of the "surge" in Iraq and conditions in Afghanistan.

Below are just a few documented news accounts you won't find anywhere else but on this blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ hosted by Bill Corcoran who is bound and determined not to let the troops down in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families back in the United States.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

50 dead in southern Iraq clashes : The Iraqi government says it has seized full control of Basra and Nasiriya after bloody clashes between the police and armed men from a "messianic cult", that left nearly 50 people dead and another 100 wounded.

Iraq: At least 25 killed in another bloody day of US occupation: Six policemen were killed and 13 wounded when two suicide bombers attacked policemen assembled for evening roll-call at a police station in the town of Albu Ubaid west of Ramadi, police said.

Afghan war only just beginning, security group warns: The war in Afghanistan is only just beginning as NATO forces, far from pursuing remnants of a defeated Taliban, are entering a widening and deepening conflict they may well lose security NGO said on Saturday.

Taliban now seriously in the fight: It has also become clear that the Taliban's "easy departure" in 2001, when a US-led invasion drove them from power, was "more of a strategic retreat than an actual military defeat," the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) said.

WAR RAGES ON IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN.

NOBODY CARES ANYMORE.

NOT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA.

NOT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are no longer of interest to the press or Americans. It doesn't make any difference that we have 160,000 troops in Iraq and 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, the media and the people of the United States couldn't care less what happens to them.

The reason is quite simple. Very few people in the media have a loved one serving in the military and the vast majority of Americans all across the country not only don't have a loved one in the United States military, they don't know of anyone who is serving in the military.

In short, the the troops that keep dying and the Iraqi citizens who continue to be killed are something the mainstream press and the American public find boring.

What a sad indictment of both the media and the American public when the attention is focused on one pregnant Marine who was savegedly killed in North Carolina, but the deaths of American troops overseas and Iraqi civilians are not even a sidebar story in the media or of interest to the American public.

Editorial comment by Bill Corcoran, host of this blog, and former Cpl. (E-4) in the United States Army Combat Engineers.

Here is just a sampling of what took place on Saturday in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Saturday, January 19, 2008

What took place in Iraq today.

Baghdad:#1: Around 10 a.m. two mortar shells slammed into Al Shoala neighborhood, minutes later another two mortar shells hit Al Ghazaliyah neighborhood. No casualties were reported.

#1: In northern Baquba, an explosive device was detonated, killing three civilians and wounding two others.Three bodyguards of Diala governor were killed and two others wounded in an improvised explosive device attack in the northeast of Baaquba city, Iraqi police said on Saturday. "An explosive charge detonated at Friday midnight in the orchard surrounding the residence of Diala Governor Raad Rasheed al-Mulla Jawad in al-Khashab area, 45 northeast of Baaquba, killing three of his security personnel and wounding two others," an assistant to Diala governor for administrative formation, Hafiz Abdul Aziz, told Aswat al-Iraq, Voices of IraqNasiriyah.

#1: Security forces on Saturday overran a mosque in southern Iraq where Shiite doomsday cultists were holed up, ending two days of clashes in two cities that killed at least 70 people, police said. The mosque was the last stronghold of the cultists. Wearing yellow headbands sporting the Star of David, they attacked police simultaneously early Friday afternoon in the southern port city of Basra and in Nasiriyah. Fighting raged through the afternoon in both cities. It died down in Basra during the night but continuing sporadically in Nasiriyah. The security forces had found the mosque to be booby-trapped and disposal experts later triggered a blast which destroyed the building, he said. Amid the rubble were found yellow headbands and anti-government literature. Police officials said at least 35 cultists were killed in Basra and 18 in Nasiriyah. A total of 12 police, two Iraqi soldiers and three civilians were also killed, according the latest police figures.

#2: Two policemen were killed by teenage snipers during Saturday's clashes in Nasiriyah. The snipers, two 14-year-old boys, were quickly arrested, police said.Hilla.

#1: The Murjana Hospital in Babel received 12 cases of food poisoning of local residents from Wassit province, an official source from the Babel police said."The Murjana Specialist Hospital in the city of Hilla received 12 people suffering from food poisoning and all of them were from Wassit," the source, who did not want to be named, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of IraqBasra.

#1: Clashes broke out in central Basra for a second day with no casualties reported, while joint security forces conducted raid-and-search operations in hunt for escaped gunmen, a local security source said on Saturday. "Limited clashes renewed on Saturday morning between security forces and gunmen belonging to the self-styled 'Soldiers of Heaven' group in downtown Basra's al-Janiniya area," the source, who preferred to remain unnamed, told Aswat al-Iraq, Voices of IraqShirqat.

#1: The most wanted al Qaeda leader in Salahuddin province was killed on Jan. 16 by U.S. troops and Iraqi police in Shirqat, 300 km (190 miles) north of Baghdad, the U.S military said.Kirkuk.

#1: On Saturday, two people were killed and seven wounded in a roadside bomb attack on an Ashura event in the northern city of Kirkuk, police said#2: Two militants were killed while trying to bury a roadside bomb which exploded in Kirkuk, police said.Mosul.

#1: Four soldiers and three civilians were wounded in an attack on the Iraqi army 2nd Brigade's 1st contingent headquarters with mortar shells, a security source said."The 1st contingent, stationed in Mosul Hotel, western Mosul, came under attack on Saturday with five mortar shells that wounded four Iraqi soldiers," Brig. Abdul-Kareem al-Juburi, the Ninewa police operations chief, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq a medical source from a Mosul hospital said the hospital received the four wounded soldiers in addition to three civilians wounded as a result of random fire opened by the Iraqi army the attack that targeted the 1st contingent.Tal Afar.

#1: A rocket slammed into the northern city of Talafar, killing four and injuring twenty people.In northeastern Tal Afar, insurgents sent a Katyusha rocket scudding into a crowd observing Ashura, killing seven people and wounding 20, Mayor Najim Abdallah told AFP.Al Anbar Prv:Fallujah.

#1: Police found two bodies with gunshot wounds near Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, police said.Afghanistan:#1: PAKISTANI troops captured 50 Islamist militants in an operation in the rugged tribal region near the Afghan border, a day after killing dozens of rebels in the area. Troops also recovered 10 bodies of the rebels from the Chaghmalai area of South Waziristan - the scene of a major clash on Friday in which an estimated 30 militants were killed.

Casualty Reports: U.S. Navy Corpsman Christopher Braley, a medic wounded in September in an explosion in Iraq, is back home in Manteca for 30 days. The 23-year old Sierra High School graduate has spent the past four months in hospitals, where he has undergone seven surgeries to recover from a Sept. 13 attack in which he lost one eye and suffered brain trauma.

Army Specialist Lawrence Guerro is the third known injured Navajo soldier from Iraq. The 26-year-old was injured on May 25, 2007, when his Humvee was hit with an improvised explosive device, or IED, while patrolling the streets of Baghdad.Guerro sustained injuries to his right-leg, which eventually had to be amputated above the knee at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Guerro spent several months at a base at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, where he began a long process of therapy and recovery.

Just another day in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which the mainstream media in the United States feels is not worth covering.

ONE U.S. SOLDIER KILLED, 128 IRAQIS KILLED

Even with documented evidence indicating all this violence is happening still in Iraq, the mainstream media---led by FOX NEWS---continues to tell the American public that all is well in Iraq.

The media in the United States has become nothing more than a pawn for the Bush administration.

1 US Soldier, 128 Iraqis Killed; 103 Iraqis Wounded

http://www.antiwar.com/updates/?articleid=12232

Updated at 9:40 p.m. EST, Jan. 19, 2008

At least 128 Iraqis were killed and 103 more were wounded in the latest attacks. The worst violence took place in Nassiriya and Basra, where a Shi’ite sect staged attacks just ahead of the culmination of Ashuraa observances. Meanwhile, Turkey claimed to have destroyed 60 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets in northern Iraq. Also, one American soldier was killed during an IED attack yesterday in Baghdad.

The Soldiers of Heaven (Jund al-Samaa) sect returned to the headlines today after clashes between sect members, who are Shi’ites, and security forces left 30 dead, including 10 policemen, and 82 wounded in Nassiriya. Last Ashuraa, similar clashes left hundreds dead, including the sect’s leader.

More Soldiers of Heaven attacks occurred in Basra, where clashes took place across much of the city. As many as 50 sect members were killed there, including their leader, while another 60 were arrested. A civilian and three policemen were killed as well. The exact number of wounded is unknown, but at least seven policemen were injured.

Two policemen were wounded during a shooting in Maqal. Also, a sniper killed a medical doctor as she left work at the general hospital.

In Baghdad, a woman and two children were killed, and two were more wounded, during a roadside bombing in Ur. Two bodies were found dumped in separate locations.

Gunmen attacked al-Bu Aziz, but Awakening Council members thwarted their attack. Seven gunmen were killed and one council member was wounded.
During the search of a home in Baquba, a bomb killed two policemen and wounded two more.

Near Baquba in al-Wejaiheiah, two policemen were killed and three more were wounded when gunmen attacked their patrol.

In Najaf, a cache of arms was discovered after a tip.

Two children were killed when an IED blew-up their home in Mo'alimeen. One woman and three men were also injured.

Three bodies, one decapitated, were found in Muqdadiyah.

In Saidiya, eight members of the Islamic State in Iraq were killed. The chief of suburban police in Kirkuk believes it might have been the work of Awakening Council members.

BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL KNEW ABOUT NEGLECT OF WOUNDED VETS

A top official in the Bush administration knew all along about the horrendous conditions wounded veterans were facing at veteran hospitals all across the United States and he chose to do nothing about it.
Once again, the mainstream media in the United States refuses to go near any story that puts the Bush administration in a bad light.
However, there is one blogger, Bill Corcoran, a military veteran, who has devoted his whole blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ to telling the truth about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and with wounded veterans back in the United States.
Below is a story of more neglect on the part of the Bush administration of wounded veterans---and the shame of it all is not one media source in the United States cares.
Bill Corcoran, host of http://corksphere.blogspot.com/


Wounded Vets Trade One Hell for Another

By Aaron Glantz, IPS News
Posted on January 18, 2008, Printed on January 18, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/74134/

Last year, the United States woke up to the reality of hundreds of thousands of soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and began to grapple with what to do about it.

On Feb. 18, 2007, a headline titled "Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at Army's Top Medical Facility" splashed across the front page of one of the nation's premier newspapers, the Washington Post. The article, which described unsafe conditions and substandard care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, began with the story of Army Specialist Jeremy Duncan, who was airlifted out of Iraq in February 2006 with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, "nearly dead from blood loss."

"Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold," the article read. "When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses."

The Post reported that patients inside Walter Reed, which lies just five miles from the White House, found it difficult to receive the care they were promised and felt they deserved.

When the story broke, politicians from both parties expressed outrage and promised solutions. Walter Reed's commander, Major General George Weightman, was fired almost immediately. Following him out the door was the Secretary of the Army, Frances Harvey.

On Mar. 6, President George W. Bush announced the formation of a bipartisan independent commission lead by former Republican Senator Bob Dole and Donna Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services under the Bill Clinton administration.

"It's unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to you, it's unacceptable to our country, and it's not going to continue," Bush told the American Legion in a speech announcing the commission's formation. "My decisions have put our kids in harm's way. And I'm concerned about the fact that when they come back they don't get the full treatment they deserve."

Three weeks later, Bush paid a visit to Walter Reed, and apologized again: "I was disturbed by their accounts of what went wrong," Bush told Walter Reed's staff after a tour of the facility. "It is not right to have someone volunteer to wear our uniform and not get the best possible care. I apologize for what they went through, and we're going to fix the problem."

But the allegations raised in the Washington Post were not actually new. In February 2005, the exact same conditions had been raised in a damning series in the on-line magazine Salon. Wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, reporter Mark Benjamin wrote, are "overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them."

Top Bush administration officials knew about Walter Reed's problems, but they had other priorities. Indeed, before the Washington Post put the facility's substandard conditions on its front page, President Bush's appointees at the Pentagon had strenuously lobbied Congress against funding military pensions, health insurance and benefits for widows of retirees. Their argument: that money spent caring for wounded soldiers and their families could be better spent on state-of-the-art military hardware or enticing new recruits to join the force.

ANTI U.S. POLITICOS GAIN CLOUT IN IRAQ

While the mainstream media in the United States continue to hoodwink the American public about how well things are going in Iraq, there are signs that the government of Iraq is about to collapse.

The "surge" was intended to open the door to reconciliation in Iraq, but the opposite is happening. There is now a growing block of anti-U.S. politicos in Iraq who are looking for ways to oust the United States out of Iraq.

The mainstream press in the U.S. refuses to tell the American public the truth about conditions in Iraq and so you have a vast majority of the people in America actually believing things are stabilizing in Iraq.

The shame of it all is not one mainstream media source in the United States is willing to go out on a limb and tell the American public the truth about Iraq.

There is one blogger who has devoted his entire blog to the REAL conditions in Iraq and not the phony baloney put out by the Bush White House and news organizations like Fox News.

That blogger is Bill Corcoran, a military veteran, who has devoted his entire blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Below is the true story of what is taking place in Iraq and not the smokescreen FOX NEWS and other news organizations are feeding the American public.
Bill Corcoran, Chicago, host of http://corksphere.blogspot.com/

Anti-U.S. Politicos Gain Clout in Iraq
By Robert Dreyfuss, The NationPosted on January 17, 2008, Printed on January 18, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/74137/

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/74137/

On January 13 an emerging Sunni-Shiite nationalist bloc in Iraq signed a groundbreaking agreement aimed at ending Iraq's civil war, blocking the privatization of Iraq's oil industry and checkmating the breakaway Kurdish state. It's a big step forward, and it could change the face of Iraqi politics in 2008.

For the past two years, Iraqi nationalists--opposed to the US occupation, opposed to Al Qaeda and opposed to Iran's heavyhanded influence in Iraqi affairs--have struggled to assert themselves. The nascent coalition contains the seeds of true national reconciliation in Iraq, but it has emerged independently of the United States. Unrelated to the constant American pressure on the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to meet various reconciliation "benchmarks," the new coalition is designed either to sweep Maliki out of office or force him to join it.

Enormous obstacles stand in the way of the Sunni-Shiite coalition, and Iraq is just as likely to descend into a new round of intense civil war as it is to stabilize under a new ruling bloc. Still, it could work, but there's a big if--if the United States steps back and gets out of the way.
Since the rigged Iraqi elections of 2005, the United States has supported a shaky and now utterly discredited four-party coalition in Iraq. Two of those parties are the ultra-religious Shiite parties, the Islamic Dawa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), both strongly supported by Iran. The other two are the Kurdish warlord parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). During that time, Iraq's two prime ministers, Ibrahim Jaafari (2005-06) and Maliki (2006-2008)--both from Dawa--have staunchly refused to open the door to increased Sunni Arab participation in the government. But now that coalition is falling apart, and its partners are increasingly at odds with one another.

The potential collapse of the Shiite-Kurdish pact that has ruled Iraq under the American occupation has created a freewheeling search for competing alliances among the myriad political factions that have emerged since Saddam Hussein's overthrow.

Partners in the new, twelve-party alliance include nearly all of the Sunni Arab parties, including the Sunni religious parties and the secular National Dialogue Front; the secular Iraqi National List of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite; two big Shiite parties, including Muqtada al-Sadr's bloc and the Fadhila (Virtue) Party; a faction of the Dawa Party; and assorted smaller groups, including independents in Iraq's Parliament. Among its goals, say its leaders, are to ensure that Iraq's "oil, natural gas, and other treasures [remain the] property of all the Iraqi people," opposing both the proposed new oil law that would open the door to privatization of the oil industry and the illegal oil deals signed by the Kurdish regional government. Another goal, they say, is to block the Kurdish takeover of the oil-rich region around Kirkuk in Iraq's north.

And, they say, the new coalition will "overcome the narrow circle of sectarianism" by uniting Sunnis and Shiites.

What's more, there are reports of talks involving the remaining Sunni resistance groups--those that have not joined the American-sponsored Awakening movement and the so-called Concerned Local Citizens groups--in a broad-based national reconciliation effort. According to the Arab press, six Sunni resistance factions have been meeting in England in preparation for a proposed conference in Cairo with representatives of the Iraqi government and political parties.

A parallel effort is under way at meetings in Beirut. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, currently touring the Middle East, has renewed his country's offer to bring Iraq's warring political factions together. Sarkozy suggested "hosting in France, far from the heat of passions and on neutral ground, inter-Iraqi roundtable talks that are as large as possible." It's unclear whether Sarkozy's proposed conference would include representatives of the armed resistance, but it's possible. (An earlier offer by France to host similar talks got the cold shoulder from Maliki and no encouragement from the United States.)

The fact that Sadr's bloc opted to join the opposition bloc is critical. Not only does Sadr command thirty-two seats in Iraq's Parliament but on the ground in Baghdad and in the south his Mahdi Army militia is a formidable force. The Fadhila Party, too, has great power in and around Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, which controls the bulk of the oil industry and Iraq's exports.

A wild card in any political realignment in Iraq is the attitude of the powerful new Sahwa (Awakening) movement, the 100,000-strong paramilitary force whose backbone is Iraq's tribal leaders. Currently, the Sahwa movement is strong in Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces to the west and north of the capital, as well as in Baghdad itself and in the suburban belt south of Baghdad. Though Sahwa is not a party (and thus has no seats in Parliament), it is a power to be reckoned with, and it is being courted assiduously both by the new nationalist coalition and by Dawa and ISCI. If forced to choose, the Sahwa movement would be far more likely to align with nationalists than with Shiite sectarian parties, since the tribal leaders regard ISCI, in particular, as an agent of Iran.

So far, the United States has continued to prop up Maliki's shaky regime, despite its growing unpopularity. US officials fear that if Maliki were to fall, the results would be unpredictable--especially in an election year. Besides, the nationalists would be far less likely than Maliki to sign the proposed long-term extension of the American presence in Iraq that Maliki and President Bush intend to ink by July.

A hint of how entrenched the American presence in Iraq might be came this week, when Iraq's defense minister, Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim, came to the United States for an extended visit, during which he met with long-range planning staff at the Pentagon. During his visit, Jasim declared that a significant number of troops would have to remain in Iraq for another ten years, until 2018.

3 U.S. SOLDIERS KILLED IN IRAQ

The ugly American press continues to ignore the deaths of brave young Americans in the Iraq war. Here is the latest deaths totally ignored by the mainstream press in the United States.


Insurgents kill three U.S. soldiers in Iraq

http://tinyurl.com/27ydgc

BAGHDAD, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Three American soldiers were killed and two others wounded by insurgents' small arms fire in north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said on Thursday.
The attack occurred when the soldiers were conducting operations in Salahudin province on Wednesday, a military statement said. Both wounded soldiers were transported to a military medical facility for treatment, the statement said.
The names of the deceased soldiers are being withheld pending notification of next of kin, it added. The latest deaths brought the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq to about 3,925 since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, accordingto media count based on Pentagon figures.

WHAT YOU WON'T READ IN U.S. PRESS ABOUT IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

The mainstream press in the United States led by the Bush White House propaganda arm, Fox News, has decided not to report on events taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the violence continues in both war torn countries and U.S. forces in both countries are finding themselves more and more caught in the middle of sectarian strife.
Iraq is anything but the peaceful country FOX NEWS is saying it is. The following is a list of events that took place on Thursday in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Does this look like the "surge" is a roaring success?

This blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ created and owned by Bill Corcoran, a military veteran, is the ONLY blog in the United States that continues to bring readers the latest from both war zones.

Bill Corcoran

War News for Thursday, January 17, 2008

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

Here's a very interesting development which we likely won't hear in the western press:The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.The shift by Iraqi farmers to producing opium was first revealed by The Independent last May and is a very recent development. The first poppy fields, funded by drug smugglers who previously supplied Saudi Arabia and the Gulf with heroin from Afghanistan, were close to the city of Diwaniyah in southern Iraq. The growing of poppies has now spread to Diyala...Baghdad:#1: In one incident, six suspects of al-Qaeda were killed and 13 were injured during a joint US-Iraqi operation in northern Baghdad, security sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.'Iraqi forces along with elements of the Awakening Council, supported by US helicopters, have raided the Bishkan area, one of the major hideouts of al-Qaeda, killing six and wounding 13 terrorist suspects,' an Iraqi official told dpa, referring to forces recruited by the US military to work against al-Qaeda and other militias. 'Dozens were also arrested,' he added.#2: 3 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad today by Iraqi Police. 2 in Saidiyah and 1 in Kamaliyah.Diyala Prv:Baquba:#1: A suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives killed eight people near a Shi'ite mosque in the volatile Iraqi city of Baquba on Thursday, police said. Another 14 people were wounded in the attack as worshippers gathered to observe Ashura, one of the holiest events on the Shi'ite religious calendar, in the Shifta neighborhood of southwest Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad.Muqdadiyah:#1: In Muqdadiyah city, some 100 kilometres north-east of Iraq's capital, US forces have killed three suspects and arrested another four during anSulaiman Pek:#1: An insurgent was killed on Wednesday while he was trying to rig a car with explosives in the town of Sulaiman Pek, 160 km (100 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.Shurqat:#1: Two policemen and two gunmen were killed during armed clashes that erupted in Salah al-Din's al-Shurqat district, Iraqi police said on Thursday. On Wednesday evening, police forces conducted a raid on gunmen's strongholds in al-Shurqat district's left coast and engaged in fierce clashes with them," a security source from Salah al-Din operations command told Aswat al-Iraq, Voices of Iraq, (VOI). "Police personnel killed two gunmen, while the others fled," the source explained, adding that two policemen were killed and three others wounded during the clashes.Tikrit:#1: An Iraqi policeman and four civilians were injured in the northern city of Tikrit, when an explosive device was detonated targeting the policeman's vehicle.#2: Militants killed a policemen and injured two of his security guards, in another attack in the city's Qadesya district.#3: An explosive device detonated in central Tikrit on Thursday, leaving five, including key police official, wounded, a Salah Al-Din police source said. “An improvised explosive device(IED) went off on Thursday, targeting the convoy of chief deputy of Highways police lieutenant colonel Khalaf Jassim in central Tikrit”.He noted “the blast left the police official seriously wounded as well as four of his escorts injured, and destroyed a police vehicle”.Mosul:#1: U.S. and Iraqi forces killed seven insurgents loading a vehicle with weapons in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.#2: Unidentified gunmen opened fire on a policeman in Mosul's western area of al-Mosul al-Jadida, killing him on the spot," the director of Ninewa police operations room, Brigadier Abdul Kareem al-Juburi, told Aswat al-Iraq, Voices of Iraq#3: An unknown armed man shot down a civilian in Mosul's downtown al-Najafi street and fled the scene," al-Juburi added. The civilian was a resident of Mosul's Makhmour district and had a membership card of a human rights society in his possession, al-Juburi explained, noting that 10 suspects have been arrested pending investigation of the shooting.#4: A policeman and a girl were injured when a car bomb exploded in front of a church in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. The front of the church was badly damaged.An abandoned carbomb explodes on the left bank of Mosul (west Mosul), in al-Shifaa neighbourhood near al-Tahira church causing the death of 1 policeman and the injury of 1 woman and damage to the outer wall of the church.#5: Militants bombed an empty primary school in the west of Mosul, police said. No one was hurt in the attack.Afghanistan:#1: Mortars apparently fired by the army in the remote region slammed into several homes, killing at least four civilians, two of them women, and wounding 13 others, residents and an intelligence official said. He requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.#2: insurgents fired small arms and rockets at a military base in Ladha, another town in South Waziristan, late Wednesday, drawing retaliatory fire from troops, the military said in a statement. No casualties were reported in the clash.#3: three rockets hit near an air force base early Thursday in Kamra, a town about 50 kilometres northwest of the capital Islamabad, but no one was hurt, the statement said.#4: Seven Canadian soldiers have suffered minor injuries in two separate explosions believed caused by roadside bombs in Afghanistan. The latest blasts happened in the Panjwaii district west of Kandahar city on Wednesday. The incidents, which affected two vehicles on the same convoy nearly three hours apart.

LA TIMES REPORTS PENTAGON AND MEDIA DOWNPLAY IRAQ

The Los Angeles Times has come out with a story saying both the Pentagon and media no longer want to report on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This explains why you NEVED see anything on TV or in the print media about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Fox example: Yesterday three U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq, but I never saw it mentioned anywhere on Fox News, CNN or MSNBC.

If there was a military draft, you would suddenly see a lot more interest in the war, but that is not about to happen either.

So as it stands now we have 160,000 troops in Iraq and another 30,000 in Afghanistan and the ONLY people who care in America are their immediate families.

What a sad, sad indictment of the American people.

This is why I started this blog. I was a GI in another forgotten war, the Korean War, and I know what it is like when nobody back home but your parents, or if you are married your wife or husband, cares at all about what you are doing in the United States military.

Bill Corcoran, host and owner of this blog. The ONLY blog in the United States devoted to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.


The American war dead
http://tinyurl.com/3x5u94

Americans keep dying in Iraq, but Pentagon policy and media fatigue obscure the full picture.

January 17, 2008

As of wednesday, 3,915 U.S. service members had been killed in Iraq. You may not have heard about this, because it isn't a nice, round, milestone-type figure -- unlike, say, 2,000, a number that inspired headlines across the country when that body count was reached in 2005.Another thing you probably haven't seen lately is images like the front-page photograph in Wednesday's Times, which showed the flag-draped coffin of Army Sgt. David J. Hart of Lake View Terrace as it arrived on an airport tarmac.

Such images are rare, partly because of a media tendency to see the commonplace as unworthy of coverage and partly because of a calculated effort by the Bush administration to prevent the American people from seeing them.Wednesday's photograph was possible because Hart's body was flown into Long Beach Airport rather than a military facility, where media photographers are forbidden from chronicling the ongoing human cost of the Iraq war.

A lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act forced the Pentagon in 2005 to release more than 700 pictures of coffins and honor guard ceremonies that were taken by military photographers, but it did nothing to ease the 1991 ban on media coverage of returning casualties.

You also may not have heard that 2007 was the deadliest year yet for U.S. troops in Iraq: 899 lost their lives, surpassing the previous high of 850 in 2004. A few newspaper and TV websites continue to list casualties, but these have nowhere near the effect of "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel's 2004 recitation of the names of the then-721 dead. The Tyndall Report, which monitors network news broadcasts, shows that less time was devoted to Iraq coverage in 2007 than in any previous yearof the conflict.

The war remains an important issue in the presidential campaign, but candidates from both parties have stopped raising it as often as they once did. The apparent success of the "surge," which has reduced both the overall violence in Iraq and the number of U.S. casualties, has unnerved critics who last spring were calling for an immediate pullout. If there's still a chance of victory, doesn't it argue for staying the course?

As politicians dither, the C-17s keep delivering a steady cargo of coffins.The vast majority of them are seen only by military personnel and the families of the dead.

U.S. INVASION LEAVES IRAQ'S HEALTH CARE A TOTAL MESS

Iraq's healthcare left in disarray after invasion

· Experienced staff emigrate due to lack of protection· Bribery is part of system, says independent report Sarah Boseley, health editorWednesday January 16, 2008The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2241367,00.html

Thanks to Lori Price, managing editor of CLG, and her excellent website http://www.legitgov.org/ for this news tip.

The full extentT of the destruction of Iraq's healthcare system and the devastating impact it has had on its people is documented today in a new report which indicts the allied invasion force for failing in its duty to protect medical institutions and staff.
The report, by an independent team of researchers and advisers from Iraq, the UK, the US and elsewhere, says the provision of healthcare "has become increasingly difficult" since the invasion. "Doctors and nurses have emigrated en masse, exacerbating existing staff shortages.

"The health system is in disarray owing to the lack of an institutional framework, intermittent electricity, unsafe water, and frequent violations of medical neutrality. The ministry of health and local health authorities are mostly unable to meet these huge challenges, while the activities of UN agencies and non-governmental organisations are severely limited."

The report, by the organisation Medact, tells how the charges for healthcare, abolished by the coalition forces in a flurry of idealism, have been quietly reinstated by health authorities unable to pay salaries and buy the drugs they need. Worse, patients now have to pay bribes to get into hospital. The report tells of one young woman, Aseel, in labour for three days with no pain relief, doctor or midwife. Her family decided they would have to find the money to get her into hospital.

"After parting with my first bank note to secure petrol from my neighbour, we prayed for safety during our long trip to Diwaniyah maternity hospital," said Aseel's husband. "Thankfully we arrived safely, and were greeted by the open hand of the security guard. We parted with another note to get in. It took a long time to find a midwife. Eventually a sleepy midwife answered my pleas and we exchanged papers, notes and promises to bring more notes. Amin was born the next morning.

"Aseel developed a serious kidney infection and needed antibiotics, but we couldn't get them in Diwaniyah. Amin had to be fed powdered milk diluted with tap water. There wasn't enough money to buy formula milk, so we had to make it last.

"Amin survived one of the toughest milestones of life - birth. By Iraqi standards his life of hardship had just started."

The provision of basic health services is very challenging, the report says, quoting Dr Ali Haydar Azize at Sadr City hospital: "Iraqi hospitals are not equipped to handle high numbers of injured people at the same time." Junior staff frequently carry out procedures beyond their competence, the report says.

VIOLENCE RIPS IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. MEDIA CONTINUES A NEWS BLACKOUT

It is criminal how the mainstream media in the United States has decided the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not worth covering anymore.

The media can find time and space for endless repetitive reports on the race for POTUS and the contremps of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or some other Hollywood celebrity, but day in and day out the media has spiked all stories coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The media are much like most of the citizens of the United States who don't have a vested interest in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because very few members of the media have a loved one serving in the military.

The United States has 160,000 troops in Iraq and 30,000 troops in Afghanistan with an additional 3,000 deploying to Afghanistan next month, but even those numbers don't jar the conscience of the media who totally ignore what you will read below that happened in Baghdad today plus other provinces and in Afghanistan.

Shame on the mainstream media in the United States. They have let our troops down in both war zones.

Bill Corcoran, host and owner of this blog.

War News for Wednesday, January 16, 2008

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

Baghdad:#1: About 10 a.m., two mortar rounds slammed into Palestine Street in east Baghdad. Three pedestrians were wounded, police said. The target was unclear, but the neighborhood is dominated by Shiites.

#2: a roadside bomb exploded at 8 a.m. in the commercial Bab al-Muadham district of Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four. The blast appeared to target a passing police car but instead hit a civilian car, a police officer said.'A bomb planted near a bus station went off in the early hours on Wednesday in Bab al-Muazim in central Baghdad, killing three people and injuring seven,' a security official told the news agency.

#3: another roadside bomb went off southeast of Baghdad at an intersection where U.S. and Iraqi troops often pass, police said. The attack killed one civilian and wounded four others.In southern Baghdad, two bombs went off at the same time in Zafaranyah, leaving one person dead and four injured, the official said.

#4: several mortar rounds struck the building of a deserted super market, which houses a base of U.S. and Iraqi troops, in Baghdad's northeastern neighborhood of Shaab, he said. The source could not tell whether the troops sustained any casualty, as the Iraqi police forces are prevented from approaching the area.

#5: Around 7,30, gunmen driving a car threw a grenade nearby Sardar car lot near the high way in Nahdha neighborhood east Baghdad. No casualties were reported.

#6: Two civilians were killed and ten others were injured in an IED explosion in Waziriyah neighborhood east Baghdad around 8,00 amDiyala Prv:

ELSEWHERE IN IRAQ VIOLENCE CONTINUED

#1: a civilian was killed and two were injured when US troops randomly shot at Iraqis in the centre of Diyala province, sources told dpa. Khan Bani Saad:#1: A woman wearing a vest lined with explosives blew herself up near a popular market and Shiite mosque in turbulent Diyala province Wednesday, killing eight civilians - the latest in a growing number of female suicide attacks. Seven people were wounded in the bombing in Khan Bani Saad, a town nine miles south of Baqouba, Diyala's provincial capital, police said.Nahrawan:#1: Two roadside bombs killed two people and wounded five near the town of Nahrawan, 30 km (20 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said.Basra:#1: the same source said that a force from the Criminal Identification Bureau defused a bomb planted behind al-Tahrir hospital in al-Maaqel region in northern Basra.Baiji:#1: A power cut forced the closure of Iraq's largest oil refinery for up to two days on Wednesday, officials at the plant said, a day after a fire led to the shutdown of another major refinery in southern Iraq. "The refinery in Baiji stopped work at 9 a.m. (0600 GMT) when the main Baiji electricity plant stopped supplying the refinery with power," said an engineer.Power was restored four hours later, but an official in Baiji refinery's media office said it would take up to two days for the plant to come back online.Dour:#1: A car bomb seriously wounded the head of the Iraqi-U.S. Joint Coordination Centre in Dour, a town near Tikrit 170 km (105 miles) north of Baghdad, the centre said. Two of his guards were also wounded.Sulaiman Pek:#1: The mayor of the small town of Sulaiman Pek, 160 km (100 miles) north of Baghdad, was seriously wounded in an attack by a suicide bomber driving a small truck, police said. Three of his bodyguards were also wounded.Tuz Khurmato:#1: Gunmen kidnapped a policeman and killed a university student in an overnight attack on a house in a village near Tuz Khurmato, 180 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.Kirkuk:#1: A policeman was injured in an IED explosion that targeted a police patrol on Baghdad Kirkuk Street south of Kirkuk city today morning.Mosul:#1: police said a suicide bomber blew up his car in an attack against a U.S. convoy in the al-Maliya district east of the city of Mosul. The U.S. military said it was investigating the report.Five civilians were wounded in a suicide attack that targeted a U.S. patrol in eastern Mosul, the head of Ninewa police operations room said on Wednesday.#2: Clashes between gunmen and the Iraqi army wounded five civilians in Mosul, police said.Afghanistan:#1: Hundreds of militants have overrun a paramilitary fort in north-west Pakistan, killing or kidnapping many troops, the military says. At least eight soldiers died in the raid and 15 escaped, the army says. The whereabouts of another 25 are unknown. Some reports put the death toll higher. "About 200 militants charged the fort from four sides," army spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas said. "They broke through the fort's wall with rockets." Officials said troops at the fort came under rocket and automatic weapons attack from militants on Tuesday night.Soldiers returned fire and the battle went on until early on Wednesday morning. People in the Sararogha area told the BBC Urdu service the exchange of fire went on for four hours.

#2: An American contractor killed in an attack on a hotel in Afghanistan knew the assignment was risky but took it anyway, a family friend said Tuesday. Thor Hesla, 45, of Atlanta, worked for BearingPoint Management & Technology Consultants, which had a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development to help war-ravaged Afghanistan rebuild, a company spokesman said.

WHILE CONDI RICE VISITED BAGHDAD THIS HAPPENED

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice made a surprise visit to Baghdad yesterday to try and get the Iraqi government to step up the process of reconcilliation. The press, of course, failed to tell Americans what was going on in Baghdad while Ms. Rice was conducting her meetings with top Iraqi government officials.

Here is just some of the violence which was taking place in Baghdad during the U.S. Secretary of State's visit Tuesday:

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

Baghdad:#1: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met top Iraqi officials in Baghdad
today.

#2: Seven people, including two policemen, were wounded when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off in central Baghdad on Tuesday morning, police said. The IED, planted by unidentified gunmen on the main road in the central Baghdad district of al-Karrada, went off as a police patrol was passing by on Tuesday morning, wounding seven including two patrol policemen and causing damage to another civilian vehicle," a security source, who preferred not to have his name mentioned, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq

#3: Around 8:30 a.m. two roadside bombs exploded near the national theater in central Baghdad. The first bomb targeted civilians injuring six civilians. The second bomb targeted police patrols that rushed to the place injuring two police officers.

#4: The head of a neighbourhood police unit in central Baghdad's Fadhil district was killed and six people were wounded in clashes with insurgents, police said.

#5: Four mortar shells and one rocket slammed into the Green Zone today, Iraqi police said. The U.S. military said they have not received reports of any injuries.

#6: Police found bodies throughout Baghdad, one in Baladiyat, one in Camp Sara, two in Waziriyah, two in Saidiyah.

#7: Five school children were killed Tuesday when a car in the convoy of a top judicial official accidentally ran them over while on their way to school in a central Baghdad neighborhood, police and hospital officials said. They said the children, ages 6 to 10, were run over in the panic that ensued when the official's guards exchanged fire with police at a checkpoint when the convoy failed to stop.

ONGOING PROBLEMS AT WALTER REED FOR WOUNDED VETERANS

The problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center persist even with all the news coverage given the atrocious conditions wounded veterans are living in at Walter Reed.


By Matt Renner t r u t h o u t Interview
Tuesday 15 January 2008

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011508J.shtml (with video)

"Nothing has changed [at Walter Reed]. Same facility. None of the recommendations that I made have been implemented and to my knowledge they really aren't working on it."
Former Army Lt. and military nurse Doug Connor sat down for an interview with Truthout reporter Geoffrey Millard to share his experience before and after the Walter Reed Medical Center scandal broke.

Encouraged by the firings of top military officials as a result of the problems at Walter Reed, Connor spoke out about the dilapidated conditions at Walter Reed. He sent a letter to Gen. Gregory A. Schumacher with recommendations for improving conditions in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) where there were equipment shortages and outbreaks of infectious bacteria, including extremely dangerous drug-resistant forms of Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacterium that has been ravaging injured soldiers in Iraq and in domestic military hospitals.

The infection problems caused other units within the hospital to lose faith in the ICU's ability to care for surgical patients. Because of the infections, "the kidney transplant team will not recover their patients in the surgical ICU anymore," Connor said in the interview.

According to Connor, his recommendations were not acted upon. Instead, he claims that he was retaliated against. "I thought he would thank me for letting him know where there were areas that needed to be fixed ... I have been retaliated against because of the letters that I have sent out. It is pretty transparent ... Everyone that has seen what happened around me is just like 'yeah, they're going after you.'"

MEDIA KISSES OFF IRAQ WAR COVERAGE

The mainstream media in the United States has decided the Iraq War is not worth covering anymore.

Oh, they will try to tell you the "surge" is working so well there isn't any violence in Iraq anymore, but that is just not so.

I'm the only blogger in the United States who has devoted my entire blog to covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars because I see a need for people to know what is happening in both war theaters inasmuch as the mainstream press doesn't care anymore.

Iraq is NOT the safe haven Americans have been led to believe and Afghanistan is on the brink of total chaos again.

However, if you want to know the latest on OJ, Drew Peterson, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan or a high speed chase in "whatever" USA, all you have to do is turn to Fox News, CNN or MSNBC.

The three cable news outlets are in a race to see who can become the most tabloid news organization in the country.

We still have 160,000 troops in Iraq and another 30,000 in Afghanistan, but the mainstream press doesn't give a damn. We are fast approaching 4,000 deaths in Iraq and there are 28,000 Iraq veterans who have been seriously wounded including many with wounds that will leave them disabled for life.

But does the mainstream press in the U.S. care? Hell no. They have bigger fish to fry like the endless reports on the Democratic and Republican races for who will be their candidate in the next Presidential election, and the boring and tiresome reports on anything to do with Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Drew Peterson and more recently the Marine who apparently killed his pregnant Marine girlfriend and is now on the lam.

So to fill the gap and give the few people in the United States who give a damn about our troops stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan, I launched my own blog http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ which I have devoted entirely to the latest developments from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, there are still wars going on over there. It is just not being reported anymore by the mainstream press.

Sad. So very sad. Break out those American flag lapel pins boys and girls of the mainstream media. Show them how much you really care and how patriotic you are.........NOT.

Bill Corcoran, host and owner of this site. Former Cpl. (E-4) U.S. Army Combat Engineers and Korean War veteran.

MEDIA CONTINUES TO IGNORE IRAQ

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IN THE UNITED STATES HAS DECLARED WAR ON THE IRAQ WAR. MEDIA NO LONGER COVERS THE IRAQ WAR.

However while the mainstream press in the United States feels the Iraq war is not worth covering anymore, the following incidents took place in Iraq on Monday, January 14.
Posted by Bill Corcoran, owner of this site.

56 Iraqis Killed, 11 Wounded

http://www.antiwar.com/updates/?articleid=12210

Updated at 11:50 p.m EST, Jan. 14, 2008

At least 56 Iraqis were killed or found dead and another 11 were wounded in the latest violence. Most of the deaths reported today were suspected gunmen in the Diyala province, but even the now-quiet Anbar province saw multiple attacks. No Coalition troops were reported killed. Also, the Iraqi defense minister suggested that U.S. troops may be needed in Iraq until 2018 or even later.

In Baghdad, five unidentified bodies were recovered. Gunmen killed a judge and his driver as they traveled through Mansour on their way to his work.

Two Iraqi soldiers were killed in Zaafaraniya. Police commandos announced that on Jan. 2 they had liberated a wounded kidnap victim near Sadr City; the kidnappers were arrested. Also, Baghdad police added mobile phones, purses, and weapons to a motorcycle ban already in effect for the Ashuraa observances; they also advise not to take children to large gatherings.

Iraqi security forces, backed by U.S. troops, killed 15 suspects and arrested 58 more in Buhriz. Seven policemen were killed inside a booby-trapped home; at least three more were wounded.

Also, an Awakening Council member was gunned down outside of town.

A car bomb in Mosul wounded six people, including three civilians, in the Ghazlani neighborhood.

In al-Tahrir, Iraqi soldiers killed two men they found planting a bomb. Also, two dead bodies were recovered.

In Haditha, four dumped bodies were discovered.

A senior Sadrist leader was gunned down in Basra.

Near Amara, a hostage was freed.
Mortars in al-Rutba caused no casualties.
In Fallujah, a mortar shell fell in the al-Wehda neighborhood but caused no casualties.
Hundreds of weapons were confiscated in Karbala as the Ashuraa religious observance continues. Three people were arrested southwest of town.

Two Coalition troops were slightly wounded during a bombing at a girls’ school in Baquba.

In al-Bahraz, Iraqi forces killed seven suspects.

U.S. forces announced that security operations in northern Iraq resulted in at least eight more deaths than previously reported; at least 60 were killed over the last week, but some of those deaths may or may not be duplicates. The casualties reported in Buhriz and al-Bahraz today, and 30 deaths reported last week may or may not be part of these 60 deaths.

Four suspects were arrested near Kirkuk.

Police detained two suspects in Najaf. Also, U.S. helicopters flew over the city in security operations designed to protect Ashuraa pilgrims.

In Samarra, 73 innocent detainees were released. Most of them were arrested in June after an attack on the Askariya shrine.
Police in Hawija located a large weapons cache and confiscated it.
An IED targeting a vehicle carrying policemen blew up near Tarmiyah. No word on casualties.

A child was injured during a mortar attack in Balad.

Also, the Turkish prime minister refuses to estimate when Turkish attacks in northern Iraq may end.

Report: at Least 121 Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Linked to Killings in the US

The Associated Press

Thanks to Lori Price of CLG http://www.legitgov.org/ for this news tip.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=4127035

NEW YORK
At least 121 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have committed a killing or been charged in one in the United States after returning from combat, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The newspaper said it also logged 349 homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans in the six years since military action began in Afghanistan, and later Iraq. That represents an 89-percent increase over the previous six-year period, the newspaper said.

About three-quarters of those homicides involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the newspaper said. The report did not illuminate the exact relationship between those cases and the 121 killings also mentioned in the report.

The newspaper said its research involved searching local news reports, examining police, court and military records and interviewing defendants, their lawyers and families, victims' families and military and law enforcement officials.

Defense Department representatives did not immediately respond to a telephone message early Sunday. The Times said the military agency declined to comment, saying it could not reproduce the paper's research.

IRAQI LEADER WANTS U.S. TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ

The mainstream media in the United States has been praising President Bush for arranging one of the 18 benchmarks originally outlined for the reconcilliation of Iraq. However, the media is not reporting there is a difference of opinion with one of the leading Iraqi chiefs who opposes the U.S. presence in Iraq.


Sahwa congress chief says opposes U.S. presence in Iraq

http://www.aswataliraq.info/look/english/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrArticle=65915&NrIssue=2&NrSection=1

National - Voices of Iraq
Sunday , 13 /01 /2008 Time 8:32:09


Riyadh, Jan 13, (VOI) – The Iraq Sahwa (Awakening) Congress chief said the Sahwa is against the U.S. presence in Iraq, calling on U.S. forces to withdraw and hand the country over to its people because "they are capable of maintaining security."

"The Sahwa council has evidence that Iran was involved in criminal acts inside Iraq," Sheikh Kamal Hammad al-Muajal Abu Risha in an interview with the Saudi edition of al-Hayat newspaper, published on Sunday, not mentioning any details about these "acts."

"The deceased Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha had called on U.S. President George W. Bush, during a meeting with him at the province of al-Anbar, to pull out U.S. troops and hand Iraq over to the Iraqis but the U.S. president replied that it was impossible to do so before making sure security is maintained in the country," He said.After the assassination of his father and six of his brothers by al-Qaeda Organization in Iraq in 2004, Sheikh Abdul-Sattar founded the Anbar Sahwa Council and chaired the Iraq Sahwa Congress, an alliance encompassing 42 clans that pledged to fight al-Qaeda members.The Sahwa tribal fighters managed to flush out armed groups from a number of areas once considered strongholds of gunmen for years.Abdul-Sattar, however, was killed in an improvised explosive device (IED) that targeted his house in al-Ramadi, capital of the predominantly Sunni Anbar.

The attack also left his bodyguard and two other escorts killed and his nephew seriously wounded."The resistance of occupation by all means is a legitimate affair but with current conditions in Iraq we are no longer able to tell the difference between terrorism and resistance. That's why we support the opinion calling for stopping all forms of resistance until security is consolidated in the country. Only then we would demand the departure of occupation forces," said Kamal Abu Risha in his interview.

IRAQ: Less Violent But Not Less Hellish

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40764

By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail*FALLUJAH, Jan 11 (IPS) -

U.S. and Iraqi officials claim that security is improving across al-Anbar province and much of Iraq. Security during the last half of 2007 was indeed better than in the period between February 2006 and mid-2007.

But this has brought little solace to many Iraqis, because violence is still worse than in 2005 and early 2006.Top Iraqi and U.S. officials and politicians have been saying that Iraq is back on its feet and that security has been established in the most volatile provinces like al-Anbar, to the west of Baghdad.

Security responsibilities here will be handed over to Iraqis in March, the U.S. military says. Violence levels are down, but attacks have not ceased.

"Nine U.S. soldiers were killed in 24 hours, U.S. B-1 and F-16 bombers dropped over 40,000 pounds of special munitions on the Arab Juboor villages just south of Baghdad, and Awakening (militia paid for by the U.S.) leaders and senior police officers are being assassinated all over Iraq, yet U.S. army leaders and top officials say Iraq is safe and sound," lawyer and human rights activist Mahmood al-Dulaimy told IPS. Dulaimy said U.S. President George W. Bush has succeeded in convincing many people in the United States that everything in Iraq is all right.

"It is you media people who fool the world by transmitting false news about the situation in Iraq," Dulaimy said. "Look around you and tell me what is good here." Looking around, one finds a ruined country. And neither occupation forces nor Iraqi government personnel seem to care about saving the little normal life that remains.

The independent U.S.-based group Just Foreign Policy says more than 1.1 million Iraqis have been killed through the occupation. According to an Oxfam International report, four million Iraqis are in need of emergency aid. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there are more than 4.5 million Iraqis displaced from their homes. "Is it good that we still cannot go to Baghdad to sell our crops and buy seeds and other necessary things for our farms," said young Jassim from Fallujah. "Is it good that we only plant ten percent of our land because there is not enough electricity and fuel to run our pumps?"

Many people in Fallujah say they simply want the U.S. forces to leave. "If the U.S. generals mean they will hand over security to Iraqis and leave the province, then I will salute them all," retired Iraqi army colonel Salman Ahmed told IPS in Fallujah. "But I know it is just another comedy like that played elsewhere in Iraq, where Iraqis (officials) are just ropes for American dirty laundry.

We want our country back for real, not just on paper." People in Fallujah, the second biggest city of al-Anbar province after capital Ramadi, say they are still in the grip of draconian security measures implemented and backed by the U.S. military. "If security is so good then let them end the tragedy of our city," a member of the Fallujah City Council, speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS. "We want our freedom back and we want to leave and enter our city without this humiliation by soldiers and policemen. Fallujah is dying, and our masters (Americans) are bragging about security and prosperity." Fifty-five-year-old mother Um Bashar came to the house where IPS was meeting with residents.

"Let them (Americans) take everything and bring me my son back," she said. "He stayed to guard the house in the November 2004 siege and the Americans captured him. Now he is missing. Some people who were released told us he was with them in the airport prison."

Iraqi people do not speak of improvement. They do not see it; they see only that these claims have become important for the U.S. elections.

THIS HAPPENED SATURDAY IN IRAQ WHILE BUSH VISITED TROOPS IN KUWAIT

While President Bush made a visit to U.S. troops in Kuwait on Saturday and was praising the Iraqi government and the Shiite and Sunni members of Iraq's parliament who have buried their differences to pass a controversial bill allowing former officials of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to return to public life, the following security incidents were taking place in Baghdad and others parts of Iraq:

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

BAGHDAD - U.S. forces arrested 15 gunmen during operations on Friday and Saturday in central and northern Iraq, the U.S. military said.

BAGHDAD - Two roadside bombs exploded in succession, wounding two people in Palestine Street in eastern Baghdad, police said.

Baghdad - Two unknown bodies found in Baghdad

Baghdad - Around 10 a.m. two roadside bombs targeted civilians in Beirut square, injuring two civilians.

Baghdad - 1 hostage freed, 7 suspects arrested during past 24 hours. The Iraqi security forces managed to set free a kidnapped hostage, arrest seven wanted men and suspects and seize three vehicles owned by gunmen in Baghdad's al-Karkh and al-Rasafa sections within the Baghdad security plan Fardh al-Qanoon during the past 24 hours, an official said.

Diyala - A parked car bomb targeted an Iraqi army convoy in Al Wajihiya, two soldiers were injured, one civilian and one child were injured. [Another story says that four security men were wounded. I don’t know if this is the same incident or not. – dancewater]

Nineveh - Gunmen killed a police officer near his house in Al Sukar neighborhood.

Sulaimaniyah - Gunmen killed Sherwan Uthman, a liquor shop owner, in Sulaimaniyah yesterday night, police said.

DHULUIYA - Gunmen killed six people in attacks on two houses, including a former Iraqi army officer and two members of a U.S.-backed neighbourhood patrol in a village near Dhuluiya, 70 km (45 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

Anbar province - U.S. soldier killed in non-combat incident in Anbar

Basra - Policeman killed, 1 wounded by gunmen fire in Basra

HEY SHEP: YOU SPOKE TOO SOON!

FOX News' Shepard Smith was boasting about how Friday was the first day in a long, long time that there was no violence in Baghdad. It appears as though Shepard Smith and FOX News spoke too soon. Smith went on to say the only thing falling in Baghadad on Friday was snow.

Hey Shep: You spoke too soon!

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/EMAE-7ARRXC?OpenDocument&rc=3&cc=irq

Factbox - Security developments in Iraq, 11 Jan 2008

Jan 11 (Reuters) - Following are security developments in Iraq at 2000 GMT on Friday.
* indicates new or updated item

* BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomb blew up outside a bakery in New Baghdad district in eastern Baghdad, killing two people and wounding eight others, police said.

* BAGHDAD - Three bodies were found dumped across Baghdad on Friday, police said.

NEW BAGHDAD EMBASSY IS A FIRE RISK

Baghdad Embassy Is Called A Fire Risk'Serious' Problems Were Ignored, Says State Dept. Official

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011103772.html?wpisrc=newsletter

By Glenn KesslerWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, January 12, 2008; A01

The firefighting system in the massive $736 million embassy complex in Baghdad has potential safety problems that top U.S. officials dismissed in their rush to declare construction largely completed by the end of last year, according to internal State Department documents, e-mails and interviews.
Some officials assert that in the push to complete the long-delayed project, potentially life-threatening problems have been left untouched. "This is serious enough to get someone killed," said a State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation. "The fire systems are the tip of the iceberg. That is the most visible. But no one has ever inspected the electrical system, the power plant" and other parts of the embassy complex, which will house more than 1,000 people and is vulnerable to mortar attacks.
Other sources involved in the project, also requesting anonymity, insist that disputes involve technical paperwork issues, largely because the contractor had never built an embassy and did not realize that under State Department rules it needed approval for substituting certain materials. Now, much of that work needs to be reexamined and checked, they said, substantially delaying the project's completion.
The finger-pointing over fire safety is a microcosm of the suspicion that hangs over the troubled project, which is built on acreage almost four times the size of the Pentagon. Originally expected to be completed by July 1, 2007, at a cost of $592 million, the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world has been plagued by poor planning, shoddy workmanship and design changes that have added to the cost. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation of the contract and related subcontracts, sources said.

THE FLIP SIDE OF THE "SURGE" COIN

Saddam Redux: U.S. Allies Itself with Sunni Strongmen

By Basil Adas, Gulf News. Posted January 11, 2008.



Sunni awakening has decreased attacks on U.S. troops, but increased Iraqis' suffering.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/73365/

The Sunni "awakening" groups formed by American forces to fight Al Qaida have successfully decreased attacks on Iraqi security forces and US troops, but have not eased the fears of citizens, according to residents.

"Abu Riyad, the awakening leader in our district, is stronger than the Americans, Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki. He orders, arrests and releases [people], pardons and punishes and this situation is no different from when the Al Adhimiya district was under Al Qaida's control," Najeel Ahmad, a resident of Al Adhimiya, told Gulf News.

Gunmen

"The residents of the district have many fears and concerns. The decision to arrest and kill residents is done by Riyadh, so the situation is still bad," he added.

Abu Riyadh, Abu Abed, Abu Nour and Abu Mashriq are all leaders of Sunni "awakening" groups.

It has become very normal, in many Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad, to see hundreds of gunmen inspecting visitors, strangers and even residents, locals say.

Haja Um Zuhair told Gulf News: "I am from Al America and every time I go shopping, my basket is subject to inspection. On every street are members affiliated to awakening leader Abu Abed.

"The reality has not changed for the better, raids and shootings are still happening. I can say that the situation has improved in terms of not targeting American or Iraqi forces, but people are still living in fear," she added.

Locals say that if someone wants to visit another district, he must inform the leader in his district, who will contact his counterpart in the other district.

One resident, Munaf Al Jabori, described the system. "I live in Al Saydia and in order to visit Al America district I have to inform Abu Noor, the leader in Al Saydia, who will contact Abu Abed, the leader in Al America, then Abu Nour gives me a paper to enter Al America and this will keep me safe. I wonder where the government and law are?"

The suffering of Sunni residents does not end there. Haji Abu Ragheed said: "The district's leader sent his followers to ask my son to join them, otherwise he will be barred from the district. Anyone who refuses to join the awakening groups will be killed, arrested and charged with cooperating with Al Qaida."

Muthefer Al Esawi, a political researcher, told Gulf News: "The American army financed and trained warlords in Sunni neighbourhoods to fight Al Qaida. I think Americans did not consider Iraqis' feelings."

JUDGE IN SF HELPS VETS GET BENEFITS

Judge in San Francisco Allows Suit Charging VA Denies Some Vets Health Care

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011108S.shtml

Thanks to Sharin Bowers for the tip on this article.


By Bob Egelko
The San Francisco Chronicle
Friday 11 January 2008

Veterans' advocates can proceed with a lawsuit claiming that the federal government's health care system for troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan illegally denies care and benefits, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti, a conservative jurist and a World War II veteran, rejected Bush administration arguments that civil courts have no authority over the Department of Veterans Affairs' medical decisions or how it handles grievances and claims.

If the plaintiffs can prove their allegations, Conti said, they would show that "thousands of veterans, if not more, are suffering grievous injuries as the result of their inability to procure desperately needed and obviously deserved health care."

He said federal courts are competent to decide whether those injuries were caused by flaws in the health care system and the VA's grievance procedures.

Conti did not rule on the adequacy of the treatment system, which will be addressed in future proceedings. But he decided one disputed issue, finding that veterans are legally entitled to two years of health care after leaving the service. The government had argued that it was required to provide only as much care as the VA's budget allowed in a given year.

U.S. DEATHS REACH 3,921

US military deaths in Iraq at 3,921

By The Associated Press
Thu Jan 10, 8:44 PM ET


As of Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008, at least 3,921 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes eight military civilians. At least 3,183 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.


The AP count is nine higher than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Thursday at 10 a.m. EST.

The British military has reported 174 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia, three; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, South Korea, one death each.

___

THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION

For confirmation: http://icasualties.org/oif/

I believe these soldiers deserve the last full measure of devotion and their sacrifice to the United States of America should be recognized by the mainstream media in the United States.

Bill Corcoran,host of this blog.

U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD: 3915
Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation: 6
Total 3921
DoD Confirmation List
Latest Coalition Fatality: Jan 09, 2008

01/10/08 DoD Identifies Army Casualties (3 of 3)
Sgt. David J. Hart, 22, of Lake View Terrace, Calif...died in Balad....died Jan. 9 of wounds sustained during combat operations in Samarra, Iraq...They were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team...

01/10/08 DoD Identifies Army Casualties (2 of 3)
Pfc. Ivan E. Merlo, 19, of San Marcos, Calif., who died in Samarra...died Jan. 9 of wounds sustained during combat operations in Samarra, Iraq...They were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team...

01/10/08 DoD Identifies Army Casualties (1 of 3)
Pfc. Phillip J. Pannier, 20, of Washburn, Ill., who died in Samarra...died Jan. 9 of wounds sustained during combat operations in Samarra, Iraq...They were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team...

U.S. WARPLANES POUND BAGHDAD. 9 U.S. SOLDIERS KILLED. 151 THOUSAND IRAQI CIVILIANS KILLED IN FIRST THREE YEARS SINCE U.S. INVADED AND OCCUPIED IRAQ

http://tinyurl.com/2tgbav

By Peter Graff1 hour, 24 minutes ago

U.S. warplanes launched their biggest air strike in Iraq since at least 2006 on Thursday, bombarding date palm groves on Baghdad's southern outskirts with more than 40,000 pounds of bombs in a matter of minutes.

Two B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets struck more than 40 al Qaeda targets in three zones of Arab Jabour, a lush district just south of the capital that has become a haven for fighters driven out of other areas.

"Thirty-eight bombs were dropped within the first 10 minutes, with a total tonnage of 40,000 pounds," the military said in a statement. "Each bomber passed over twice and the F-16s followed to complete the set."

The attack formed part of Operation Phantom Phoenix, a major countrywide offensive against al Qaeda guerrillas that U.S. forces announced this week.

TOLL ON US SOLDIERS

The offensive has taken its toll on American forces as well. After a month in which the rate of U.S.-led coalition deaths fell to fewer than one per day for the first time since 2004, nine American soldiers were killed in 48 hours.

Gates said the deaths were a "stark reminder of the work that remains to be done."
Six American soldiers were killed on Wednesday by an explosion in a booby-trapped house in Diyala province, and three others were killed on Tuesday in Salahuddin province, two northern areas where U.S. forces say al Qaeda has regrouped.

The United Nations' World Health Organization released figures on Wednesday estimating about 151,000 Iraqi civilians had died violently in Iraq in the war's first three years, with the exact figure falling between 104,000 and 223,000.

The WHO figure, based on a survey of 10,000 Iraqi households, does not include deaths after June 2006. The 12 months that followed were the deadliest year of the war.

WHAT CANDIDATE FOR POTUS WOULD STOP THIS?

We have now gone through a caucus and a primary and we are wondering who you think might best stop what is described in the story below? The presidential field is narrowing and according to all exit polling getting out of Iraq is still uppermost on the minds of voters. We invite your comments. Just click on "comments" at the end of the story below and tell us who you think would do the best job of getting us out Iraq and why you think they are better than anyone else running for President of the United States.

US military deaths in Iraq at 3,911

By The Associated Press Tue Jan 8, 9:05 PM ET

As of Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008, at least 3,911 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes eight military civilians. At least 3,183 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

The AP count is the same as the Defense Department's tally, last updated Tuesday at 10 a.m. EST.

The British military has reported 174 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia, three; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, South Korea, one death each.

The latest identifications reported by the military:

• Army Spc. James D. Gudridge, 20, Carthage, N.Y.; died Sunday in Baghdad after his vehicle struck an explosive; assigned to the 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.

• Army Pfc. Timothy R. Hanson, 23, Kenosha, Wis.; died Monday in Salmon Pak of wounds from small-arms fire; assigned to the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga.
___
On the Net:
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/

MORE VIOLENCE HITS IRAQ

While the mainstream focuses 24/7 on the political race for POTUS, there is a growing concern in Iraq that violence is on the upswing. Late Tuesday, the following took place in Iraq:


5 killed in fresh Iraq violence Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:51:22

http://tinyurl.com/27kxmg

At least five people have been killed and eight wounded in a series of separate attacks in Iraq, police and officials have announced. The head of the municipality of Baghdad's neighborhood of Yarmouk was killed when a bomb attached to his car exploded on Tuesday, a police officer said Tuesday on condition of anonymity. To the south, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at a checkpoint manned by police special forces in the Madain area, about 25 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, killing two policemen and wounding eight others, police said. In another incident also on Tuesday in the capital, a police colonel was shot dead by unidentified attackers in the Zafaraniyah neighborhood, an interior ministry official said. In the western Mansour district, a tax department official was shot dead by gunmen as he left his home.

IRAQ ERUPTS IN VIOLENCE. MAINSTREAM MEDIA REMAINS MUM

All across Iraq violence has erupted and yet the mainstream media in the United States remains mum on what is taking place in Iraq. Here is just a partial list of what took place in Iraq on Tuesday, January 8, 2008.

Posted by Bill Corcoran, host of CORKSPHERE.

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

Security incidents:Baghdad:#1: The same day, gunmen kidnapped eight Awakening members at a checkpoint in Shaab, a mainly-Shiite neighbourhood in northeastern Baghdad where Awakening members have taken control of security, an Iraqi official said. "Gunmen in five cars arrived in Shaab neighbourhood on Monday evening and abducted eight Shiite Awakening members who were controlling a checkpoint," the interior ministry official said on Tuesday.

#2: Ismael Abbas, the Awakening leader in Shaab, was shot dead in the street by gunmen using silencers, he added.

#3: In other violence in the capital on Tuesday, a police colonel was shot dead by unknown attackers in the mainly-Shiite Zafaraniyah neighbourhood in southeastern Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.Around 7 a.m., gunmen assassinated an officer of the ministry of interior “ Mohammad Aziz Al-Gatia in his car in Zafrania neighborhood ( east Baghdad)

#4: In the western Mansour neighbourhood, a tax department official was shot dead by gunmen as he left his home.Gunmen using weapons with silencers killed the deputy manager of the Mansour district tax office in western Baghdad, police said.

#5: A roadside bomb killed the chief of the Yarmouk District Council, Salih Mansour Hussein, and wounded two of his bodyguards in the Yarmouk district of western Baghdad, police said.

#6: Around 3 p.m., two mortars hit Medain district ( south of Baghdad ) injuring 2 people.

#7: Around 3 .30 p.m., a roadside bomb targeted an American patrol at Rashid camp neighborhood ( south east Baghdad) . No casualties reported.

#8: Police found 5 unidentified dead bodies in the following neighborhood in Baghdad: ( 3 ) dead bodies were found in west Baghdad ( Karkh bank ) ; 1 in Doura , 1 in Bayaa and Amil . While ( 2 ) were found in east Baghdad ( Risafa bank) ; 1 in Ubaidi and 1 in Fudhailiyah.Diyala Prv:#1: U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a major operation Tuesday to strike against al-Qaida in Iraq and other extremists, a top U.S. commander in Iraq said in a statement. The location for the division and brigade-level operation, dubbed Phantom Phoenix, was not announced. But extremists have been pushed out of their former stronghold in Anbar province west of Baghdad to the east and north and appear to be concentrated in the province of Diyala to the northeast of the capital.#2: A civilian was injured when unknown armed men opened fire on him in al-Saadiya region in Khaniqeen district, northeast of Baaquba," the source continued.Muqdadiya:#1: An explosive device went off near a house in Muqdadiya, northeast of Baaquba, injuring a woman," the source, who requested anonymity, told the independent news agency Voices of IraqLatifiya:#1: Gunmen killed a neighbourhood patrol volunteer at a checkpoint in Latifiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.Madaen:#1: A suicide bomber wearing an explosives vest attacked a police checkpoint, killing one policeman and wounding another along with two civilians in Madaen, 45 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.Hilla:#1: Gunmen shot and wounded a former army officer on Monday south of Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.Kut:#1: Police said they had killed a lawyer with stray bullets when they returned fire after being shot at in northern Kut, 170 km (100 miles) southeast of Baghdad.Salman Pak:#1: At Salman Pak, around 25 kilometres (16 miles) southeast of Baghdad, two policemen were killed and eight people, four of them police, were wounded when a suicide bomber attacked a security checkpoint, police said. The male bomber disguised himself in the all-covering abaya garment worn by women, a police official said.Hawija:#1: Three people of the same family were killed in an armed attack in the district of al-Huweija, southwest of Kirkuk, on Tuesday, an official security source in Kirkuk police said."Unidentified gunmen opened fire on a civilian vehicle carrying a man, his wife and his son, who is a soldier in the Iraqi army, in al-Hueweija, (70 km) southwest of Kirkuk, killing them instantly," the source, who refused to be named, told the independent news agency Voices of IraqMosul:#1: Two bodies were found in eastern Mosul, one of them handcuffed and blindfolded, police said.#2: A roadside bomb went off on al-Shura district road, south of Mosul, killing a civilian and causing severe material damage to his car," the source, who asked to be unnamed, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq#3: the same source said, "police patrols found this afternoon three bullets-riddled bodies: one in al-Qahera neighborhood in northern Mosul, while the two remaining bodies were found in al-Mulawatha and al-Sahagi regions in western Mosul."Sulaimaniya:#1: Police forces found two bodies of workers in a house under construction west of Sulaimaniya, a source from the Sulaimaniya emergency police department said on Tuesday."A citizen informed the police of the two bodies in a house under construction in Kani Kourda west of Sulaimaniya," Lieutenant Umed Mohammad Ahmad told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq

TWIN BOMBINGS IN BAGHAD. VIOLENCE ESCALATES

There is increased concern that violence is escalating in Iraq. Although the media in the United States is not reporting, twin bombs were set off in Baghdad Monday killing 14 and injuring scores of others. Also not reported by the mainstream media in the United States is the death of two U.S. soldiers in Iraq on Sunday. Meanwhile, there has been little or no progress with the Iraqi government and most of Iraq is still suffering from lack of electricity and water. Posted Tuesday, January 7 at 5 AM CST by Bill Corcoran, blog host.


Twin suicide bomb kills 14, including Baghdad anti-Qaida leader

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-01/08/content_7381383.htm

Special report: Tension escalates in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Up to 14 people were killed, including an anti-Qaida leader, in a twin suicide bombing in a northern Baghdad neighborhood on Monday, raising fears of a return to violence after a period of a relative lull in the past months.
One suicide bomber detonated a vest packed with explosives at the entrance of the office of the Sunni Endowment, a government agency that looks after Sunni mosques and shrines, at about 11a.m. (0800 GMT) in Baghdad's northern neighborhood of Adhamiyah, an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

MORE PROOF THE "SURGE" IS NOT WORKING

Iraq death rate belies US claims of success

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3315022.ece



By Kim Sengupta
Published: 07 January 2008


The death rate in Iraq in the past 12 months has been the second highest in any year since the invasion, according to figures that appear to contradict American claims that the troop "surge" has dramatically reduced the level of violence across the country.
The research comes from Iraq Body Count (IBC), which has extensive experience of working in the country, and concludes that deaths outside Baghdad actually rose until September.


However, the group also concludes that the number of those killed in Baghdad, where the majority of American reinforcements for surge operations were deployed, has fallen significantly during the year.


IBC compiles its data from official sources, including the Pentagon, and found that between 22,586 and 24,159 civilian deaths were documented for 2007, with the vast majority of those killed between January and August.


The most lethal violence took place in Nineva, where the number of deaths rose by 143 per cent. Baghdad on the other hand saw a decline of around 39 per cent after a drastic fall in numbers of deaths in the last three months of the year.


The first eight months of 2007 also saw the highest number of car-bombings in the Iraq. The report claims that last year there were 20 explosive devices that killed more than 50 civilians, compared with 12 bombings in 2006.



The number of civilians killed during operations involving US forces in the past 12 months also rose, from between 544 and 623 in 2006 to between 868 and 1,326 in 2007. The report claims that most of these casualties were linked to air strikes, in which 88 children were reported to have died.


Around 900 US and 47 British troops have also been killed in the past year.

BOMB FOUR CHURCHES IN IRAQ

Violence continues to escalate in Iraq as four churches were bombed in the city of Mosul. The mainstream media in the United States no longer reports on events on the ground despite the fact there are still 160,000 U.S. troops deployed to Iraq.

Posted Monday, January 7 by Bill Corcoran, host of "Corksphere."


Bomb attacks target four churches in N Iraq

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-01/06/content_7375202.htm
www.chinaview.cn 2008-01-06 23:17:44


Special report: Tension escalates in Iraq

MOSUL, Iraq, Jan. 6 (Xinhua) -- Insurgent groups attacked on Sunday four churches for Iraqi Christian minority in the city of Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, a provincial police source said.
A car bomb parked near the Maryam al-Adhra' Church northeastern of Mosul detonated, wounding four people and damaging parts of the building, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Another booby-trapped car parked near the Mar Yousif Church in the Muhandiseen neighborhood in northern the city detonated and damaged outer fence and parts of the church, the source said.
In western Mosul, an explosive charge went off in a monastery in the Mosul al-Jadida neighborhood, damaging part of the deserted building without human casualty, he said.
A fourth bomb attack took place in the Meskantah Church in the Khazraj neighborhood in central the city, causing damages in the building, added the source.
The attacks against the Christian minority came as part of the religious and sectarian violence that ravaged the Iraqi cities, including Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad.

BOMBER KILLS 11 IN BAGHDAD

All we hear about on television is how well the "surge" is doing in Baghdad, but look what took place Sunday in Baghdad. There were also three other incidents of suicide bombs going off in Baghdad. The American media continues to LIE to the American public about conditions in Baghdad.

Posted by Bill Corcoran, h