FOX NEWS will never report on these three brave young Americans who have sacrificed so much in Iraq fighting in the ill-conceived war concocted by President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
Casualty Reports From the Iraq War:
Matt Keil--One sniper's bullet in Iraq left Matt a quadriplegic.
Josiah Blystone was on his first tour of duty near Baghdad when he was seriously injured during a routine patrol. He was “just walking along and all of a sudden the IED exploded,” Blystone's sister Christin Porter said. Shrapnel flew into his right arm, tearing apart the nerves. It landed in the side of his face and in his right eye. “They're not expecting him to be able to see out of it (his right eye) again,” Porter said. Blystone is recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Blystone was injured by the homemade bomb Feb. 16. He had only been in Iraq for about four months.
Lee Jones, 25, suffered a brain injury and severe burns in combat, he has survived three strokes that have slowed his speech.
ELSEWHERE IN BAGHDAD AND ACROSS IRAQ VIOLENCE, MAYHEM AND CHAOS CONTINUES WITH NO LET UP IN SIGHT
Monday: 79 Iraqis Killed, 105 Wounded
Sunday: 33 Iraqis Killed, 41 Wounded
Baghdad bombings kill 23
British missiles kill 2, wound 4 in Basra
Young Iraqis are losing their faith in religion
After almost five years of war, many young Iraqis, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach. In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives. "I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us," said Sara Sami, a high school student in Basra. "Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don't deserve to be rulers." [If this is true, why did 7 to 10 million people go to the latest religious event in Najaf? – dancewater]
War News for Monday, March 03, 2008
Baghdad:#1: In Baghdad, a parked car bomb killed at least 21 people and wounded 43 in central Baghdad's Bab al-Mudham area. The car was parked on a road leading to the nearby Housing and Municipality Ministry, police said. The dead included one police officer, while another four were wounded. The district is a commercial area on the eastern side of the Tigris River.
#2: In the suicide attack, a man drove a minibus into the headquarters of the Interior Ministry's 4th Brigade, a special quick reaction force based in Baghdad's eastern Zayouna neighborhood. The blast killed at least two police officers and wounded six other people.
#3: Two civilians were wounded in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack in a third incident in the Iraqi capital on Monday despite strict security measures over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit, a police source said. "The new bombing occurred on Monday afternoon when a roadside IED planted by unidentified gunmen on the main road in al-Waziriya area, northern Baghdad, went off, inuring two nearby civilians," the source told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq.
#4: The Department of Foreign Affairs has confirmed that a South African man has been killed in Iraq. Spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa says the department was contacted by the man's employer who sought assistance with bringing the body back home. Foreign affairs agreed to assist in this regard and they are in contact with the family to finalise the repatriation. Mamoepa said he could not give any further details on the circumstances surrounding the man's death.
#5: Five unidentified bodies were found on Monday in the Iraqi capital Baghdad by police patrols, police said.
#6: Three Iraqi army soldiers were injured on Monday in a bomb blast in western Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said." A roadside bomb was detonated this afternoon targeting an Iraqi army patrol near an al-Shurta tunnel in western Baghdad, injuring three soldiers," the source told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq
Diyala Prv:#1: A Katyusha missile fell on a residential compound in the district of al-Saadiya, (100 km) northeast of Baaquba, wounding four civilians and destroying a house," the source, who did not want to be named, told Voices of Iraq – Voices of Iraq
Monday, March 3, 2008
THREE HEART-BREAKING STORIES OF U.S. SOLDIERS WOUNDED IN IRAQ
HIGH NUMBER OF U.S. CASUALTIES IN IRAQ FROM TEXAS, OHIO CASTS SHADOW ON ELECTION
Ohio and Texas are among states with the largest numbers of military installations, deployments and war casualties. Ohio has lost 166 while Texas has mourned 366, the second highest death total behind California's 428.
Iraq casts shadow on Ohio, Texas votes
By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080303/ap_on_el_pr/war_politics
Two big states holding presidential primaries Tuesday have something more tragic in common — high numbers of military casualties in Iraq.
Combined, Ohio and Texas have sustained roughly one-eighth of all U.S. troop deaths in a war that's certain to shape the general election as candidates with two vastly different approaches — stay or go — compete for votes in communities that have been personally touched by the conflict that began with a U.S.-led invasion five years ago this month.
"This strategy is succeeding," insists Republican Sen. John McCain, the likely GOP nominee who plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for the near future and who daily derides his Democratic rivals as defeatists.
Countering, Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton want the military out now and argue that the Republican would keep the country's armed forces entangled in Iraq indefinitely.
"We cannot wait to bring this war in Iraq to a close," argues Obama at every turn while Clinton frequently promises, "I would begin pulling the troops out in the first 60 days."
With such disparate positions, the Iraq war is certain to be a dominant topic, perhaps the defining issue, in the election as U.S. military deaths near 4,000 and the cost approaches $500 billion.
In Ohio and Texas, both party's contenders are courting a constituency that while war-weary also is deeply supportive of U.S. troops embroiled in a conflict that has intimately affected small towns like McConnelsville, Ohio, and military bastions around Fort Hood, Texas, as well as every place in between.
Click on link to read the full story.
12 TO 15 MILLION IRAQIS WILL NOT RETURN TO IRAQ
Despite what you may hear on TV, especially FOX NEWS, there are more Iraqi civilians leaving Iraq than those that are returning.
Between 12 and 15 MILLION Iraqis who now live in Syria and Jordan say they have no plans of returning to Iraq.
The reasons they give flys in the face of what the Bush administration and their puppet FOX NEWS are telling the American public.
Namely, it is still too dangerous in Iraq as witnessed by the two car bombs that went off in Baghdad on Monday morning killing at least 45 people and injuring scores of others.
The news comes on the heels of actress Angelina Jolie's recent visit to Baghdad as part of the United Nations Human Rights Commission where she stated the U.S. military should stay in Iraq until all the Iraqi refugees safely return to their country.
IRAQ: 'Not Our Country To Return To'
By Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail*DAMASCUS, Mar 3 (IPS)
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41430
- More Iraqis continue to flee their country than the numbers returning, despite official claims to the contrary.
Thousands fleeing say security is as bad as ever, and that to return would be to accept death. "Return to Iraq?" asks 35-year-old Ahmed Alwan, an Iraqi engineer now working at a restaurant in Damascus. "There is no Iraq to return to, my friend. Iraq only exists in our dreams and memories."
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported September last year that there are between 1.2 and 1.4 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone. Most, like Alwan, do not intend to return. "I shall never return to Iraq until the last American soldier and Iranian mullah leaves," Alwan says. "It is their country now, not ours. The only thing that might take me back is when I decide to fight for Iraq's real liberty." Iraqi refugees in Syria speak of lack of security back home, lack of services, fear of the future, mistrust of Iraqi politicians, and loss of homes. Most are simply too afraid to return.
A UNHCR report issued last month contradicts reports by mainstream media in the U.S., and claims by the Bush administration, that more Iraqis are returning to their homes than the number leaving.
The report says that from February 2006-October 2007 Syria received between 30,000-60,000 refugees each month. Immigration officials at al-Tanf on the border say the daily average for those entering Syria from Iraq in late January was over 1,200, while the daily average crossing back was less than 700.
"Many assassinations take place all over Iraq, including Baghdad, and military operations are still being carried out the same way as 2004 and 2005," Nayil Mufeed, a security advisor with a mobile phone company in Baghdad told IPS. "We have advised our employers that moving out of Baghdad to Amman is a definite necessity in such a fragile security situation."
Click on link above to read the full account of the Iraqi refugee problem.
NOAM CHOMSKY: WHY ISN'T IRAQ IN THE 2008 ELECTION?
Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus at MIT, has long been considered one of the most brilliant minds in America. His book, "Manufacturing Consent," co-authered with Professor Edward Hermann, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, spelled out how the corporate media controls what the American public reads, sees and hears from news organizations.
In this article, Chomsky asks the question: "Why Isn't Iraq in the 2008 Election," and he answers the question in a way only Chomsky could answer it.
Noam Chomsky: Why Isn't Iraq in the 2008 Election?
By Noam Chomsky, Democracy Now!Posted on March 3, 2008, Printed on March 3, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/78408/
The following speech, transcribed by Democracy Now!, was delivered by Chomsky in Massachussetts at an event sponsored by Bikes Not Bombs.
Not very long ago, as you all recall, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the 2008 election, as it was in the midterm election two years ago. However, it's virtually disappeared off the radar screen, which has solicited some puzzlement among the punditry.
Actually, the reason is not very obscure. It was cogently explained forty years ago, when the US invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year and the surge of that day was about to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already there, while South Vietnam was being bombed to shreds at triple the level of the bombing of the north and the war was expanding to the rest of Indochina.
However, the war was not going very well, so the former hawks were shifting towards doubts, among them the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, maybe the most distinguished historian of his generation, a Kennedy adviser, who -- when he and Kennedy, other Kennedy liberals were beginning to -- reluctantly beginning to shift from a dedication to victory to a more dovish position.
And Schlesinger explained the reasons. He explained that -- I'll quote him now -- "Of course, we all pray that the hawks are right in thinking that the surge of that day will work. And if it does, we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning a victory in a land that we have turned," he said, "to wreck and ruin. But the surge probably won't work, at an acceptable cost to us, so perhaps strategy should be rethought."
Well, the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq today.
And it is a land of wreck and ruin.
You've already heard a few words; I don't have to review the facts. The highly regarded British polling agency, Oxford Research Bureau, has just updated its estimate of deaths.
Their new estimate a couple of days ago is 1.3 million. That's excluding two of the most violent provinces, Karbala and Anbar. On the side, it's kind of intriguing to observe the ferocity of the debate over the actual number of deaths. There's an assumption on the part of the hawks that if we only killed a couple hundred thousand people, it would be OK, so we shouldn't accept the higher estimates.
You can go along with that if you like.
Uncontroversially, there are over two million displaced within Iraq. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees who have fled the wreckage of Iraq aren't totally wiped out. That includes most of the professional classes. But that welcome is fading, because Jordan and Syria receive no support from the perpetrators of the crimes in Washington and London, and therefore they cannot accept that huge burden for very long. It's going to leave those two-and-a-half million refugees who fled in even more desperate straits.
The sectarian warfare that was created by the invasion never -- nothing like that had ever existed before. That has devastated the country, as you know. Much of the country has been subjected to quite brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and militias.
That's the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy that's developed by the revered "Lord Petraeus," I guess we should describe him, considering the way he's treated.
He won his fame by pacifying Mosul a couple of years ago. It's now the scene of some of the most extreme violence in the country.
Click on link above to read the full Noam Chomsky story.
FIND OUT HOW MUCH YOUR COMMUNITY IS PAYING TO SUPPORT THE IRAQ WAR
National Priorities Project analyzes and clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent.
Find out the cost and trade-offs for your community
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home
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BREAKING NEWS: BAGHDAD CAR BOMB KILLS 15
"The Surge" didn't stop this from happening Monday morning in Baghdad.
Baghdad Bomb Kills 15
MAR. 3, 3:44 AM (ET)
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080303/D8V5S1EG0.html
(BAGHDAD (AP) - A parked car bomb killed at least 15 people and wounded 38 in central Baghdad on Monday morning, police and hospital officials said.
The bomb detonated in the Bab al-Mudham area of the capital. The car was parked on a road leading to the Housing and Municipality Ministry located in that the area, police added.
The dead included one police officer. The Bab al-Mudham district is a commercial area on the eastern side of the Tigris River.
