TEHRAN, June 29 (Xinhua) -- A senior Iranian military official said on Sunday the Islamic republic is digging some 320,000 graves in its border provinces for future slain invaders, Iran's English-language satellite channel Press TV reported.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-06/30/content_8459225.htm
Iran's Armed Forces headquarters has approved the plan to dig graves for enemy forces in case of any attack on its territory, said Brigadier General Mir-Faisal Baqerzadeh, head of the Foundation for the Remembrance of the Holy Defense.
"We do not wish the families of enemy soldiers to experience what Americans had to go through in the aftermath of the Vietnam War," said Baqerzadeh, who is also head of Iran's search committee for missing soldiers.
The preemptive measures would decrease the time during which slain soldiers would be buried, the Iranian military official said, adding "the burial of slain soldiers will be carried out decently and in little time."
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Thanks to Lori Price at http://www.legitgov.org/ for heads up on this story
Sunday, June 29, 2008
IRAN IS DIGGING 320,000 GRAVES FOR INVADERS-MILITARY OFFICIAL
WASHINGTON POST IS REPORTING SUNDAY IRAQ OFFICIALS FURIOUS WITH U.S. OVER RAID THAT KILLED RELATIVE OF PRIME MINISTER AL MALIKI
Reported U.S. Raid Triggers Outrage
By Ernesto Londoño and Saad SarhanWashington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 29, 2008; A13
BAGHDAD, June 28 -- Iraqi officials in the home town of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are calling for an investigation into a reported raid by the U.S. military early Friday that resulted in the death of a man identified by some Iraqi officials as a relative of the prime minister.
The raid was carried out shortly after midnight in the town of Hindiyah, 50 miles southwest of Baghdad in Karbala province. According to Iraqi officials in Karbala, a team of about 60 U.S. soldiers traveling in four helicopters descended on a sparsely populated area a few miles from the town, where the prime minister owns a villa.
"We are shocked by the news of the raid," Karbala Gov. Aqeel al-Khazaly said at a news conference Friday afternoon. "The aerial landing and subsequent operations led to the death of an innocent civilian and the arrest of another."
Karbala is one of nine Iraqi provinces where the U.S. military has handed over responsibility for security to local officials. Khazaly, who has been a U.S. ally, said Iraqi officials were not notified about the operation and called it a violation of the handover agreement.
WAR WITH IRAN IS GETTING CLOSER. U.S. STEPS UP COVERT OPERATIONS AGAINST IRAN
U.S. escalating covert operations against Iran: report
Sunday, June 29, 2008
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. congressional leaders agreed late last year to President George W. Bush's funding request for a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New Yorker magazine published online on Sunday.
The article by reporter Seymour Hersh, from the magazine's July 7 and 14 issue, centers around a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which by U.S. law must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees.
"The Finding was focused on undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change," the article cited a person familiar with its contents as saying, and involved "working with opposition groups and passing money."
SUNDAY MORNING BREAKING NEWS: TRUCK BOMB KILLS 7 NEAR BAGHDAD
Truck bomb kills 7 in Iraq
The Associated Press
Article Last Updated: 06/29/2008 01:29:34 AM PDT
BAGHDAD—Police say a truck bomb has killed seven people in Iraq.
Police Col. Mohammed Khalid says the truck was detonated by remote control Sunday when police and security guards went to check the vehicle. The truck had been parked along the side of a road in Duluiyah, about 45 miles north of Baghdad.
Six of the dead were policemen and the seventh was a member of the local awakening council—volunteers who have turned against the insurgents.
WASHINGTON POST: ARMY'S POST-SADDAM PLAN IS WRECKING ARMY NATIONAL GUARD AND ARMY RESERVES
Army's History of Iraq After Hussein Faults Pentagon
By Josh WhiteWashington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 29, 2008; A03
http://tinyurl.com/4ja8tm
A new Army history of the service's performance in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein faults military and civilian leaders for their planning for the war's aftermath, and it suggests that the Pentagon's current way of using troops is breaking the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.
The study, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," is an unclassified and unhindered look at U.S. Army operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq's decades-old regime was overthrown.
Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who authored the report along with the Army's Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on only the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like following that triumph.
"The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began," write Wright and Reese, historians at the Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect."
The results of those errors, they add, were that U.S. forces and their allies lacked an operational and strategic plan for success in Iraq, as well as the resources to carry out a plan.
Continue reading story here: http://tinyurl.com/4ja8tm
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN IRAQ FRIGHTENED AS VIOLENCE INCREASES
Too bad FOX NEWS and the rest of the mainstream media don't try telling the college students of Iraq how violence is down.
They might get and earful or worse.
University students in Ninewa frightened as violence increases
Ninewa - Voices of Iraq
Saturday , 28 /06 /2008 Time 1:09:22
http://tinyurl.com/3u3ypu
Mosul, Jun 27, (VOI) – Operations conducted by gunmen or security forces that target university students in Ninewa province have recently increased.
This phenomenon made university professors, governmental officials, as well as students themselves fear the violence that target this social category.
Within 10 days, two students were killed inside the Mosul University's compound by security forces, claiming that the two were important wanted elements. On last Monday, another student was killed by unknown gunmen when he was on his way out of Mosul University.
Four students were kidnapped by unknown gunmen, when the students were on their way to take the final exams at Mosul University (al-Majmoaa al-Thaqafia neighborhood in northern Mosul).
Continue reading story here http://tinyurl.com/3u3ypu
U.S. PAYS RAG-TAG FORCE $300 A MONTH TO GUARD SADR CITY
Rag-tag force watches over Iraq militia hotspot
U.S.-funded patrols feature ex-militants, AK-47s, vodka-branded ball caps
The poor, east Baghdad slum of two million people has largely been outside the government's control for years.
U.S. forces are paying local residents $300 a month to guard their area and search vehicles for guns or explosives.
The neighborhood guard in Sadr City is the first attempt to set up such a force in the Baghdad stronghold of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
Reuters
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25384295/
BAGHDAD - A rag-tag band of men toting AK-47s at a checkpoint in Baghdad's Sadr City forms part of a plan to strengthen the Iraqi army's hold over a bastion of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The men, wearing tan uniforms and baseball caps with "Smirnoff" inexplicably blazoned across them, belong to one of the first groups of a new neighborhood guard to take to the streets of the sprawling district under a U.S.-funded program.
U.S.-backed neighborhood patrol units, sometimes called "Sons of Iraq", have spread in mainly Sunni Arab areas of Iraq to beef up security and combat al-Qaida insurgents.
The U.S. military says such groups helped cut violence in Iraq to its lowest level in more than four years in May.
