Antiwar.com Blog

BAGHDAD, Iraq (March 28, 10:23 am AST) – The U.S.-led coalition on Sunday shut down a weekly newspaper run by followers of a hardline Shiite Muslim cleric, saying its articles were increasing the threat of violence against occupation forces.

Hours after the closure of Al-Hawza, more than 1,000 supporters of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demonstrated peacefully in front of the newspaper’s offices, decrying what they called a crackdown on freedom of expression.

Dozens of U.S. soldiers arrived at the Al-Hawza newspaper offices Sunday morning and closed its doors with chains and locks, sheik Abdel-Hadi Darraja said in front of the one-story house.

Darraja is a representative of al-Sadr, who lives in the southern holy city of Najaf and has been an outspoken critic of the U.S.-led occupation, but has not called for armed attacks.

OK, so Bremer is shutting down an Iraqi paper run by Muqtada al Sadr’s bunch. That seems pretty foolish to me, since it is inviting a retaliation. They really don’t need al Sadr on the warpath right now, do they? But aside from how dumb it is to do this totalitarian dictator act right now, how ridiculous is this?

A coalition spokesman confirmed the 60-day closure, saying several articles “were designed to incite violence against coalition forces and incite instability” in Iraq.

The spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said any violation of the closure could lead to the imprisonment of newspaper employees for up to one year and a fine of up to $1,000.

Now, where did this rule come from? The new “constitution?” Is Bremer making this up as he goes? Is Bremer going to be running the jails in Iraq a year from now, or are the Iraqis just supposed to lock up whoever Bremer says to lock up?

One thing is certain. No one is “inciting violence” in Iraq better than the Americans with their military occupation enforcing Stalinist policies.

“What is happening now is what used to happen during the days of Saddam. No freedom of opinion. It is like the days of the Baath,” said Hussam Abd al-Kadhim, 25, a vendor who took part in the demonstration, referring to the Baath Party that ruled Iraq for 35 years until Saddam Hussein was ousted a year ago.

Well, at least the oil wells that haven’t been blown up got liberated.

Al-Sadr, who lives in the southern holy city of Najaf, is outspoken about the US-led occupation, but has not called for armed attacks.

Yet.

A statement issued by his office on the newspaper’s closure said: “We ask everybody to come to the newspaper and stay there until it is reopened.”

OK, Bremer. Looks like it’s your move.

“You can’t escape and you can’t hide … the coalition will find you and bring you to justice.”

This is a leaflet that the Marines have scattered all over Fallujah, according to Iraqis.

In 10 days since the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force relieved the 82nd Airborne in Fallujah, 7 Marines have been killed.

Don’t expect to find out how those Marines were killed. Carol Rosenberg reports for Knight Ridder:

Adopting a new tactic, the Marines have stopped giving information about how Marines have been killed or give any details about the latest battles, saying any information helps the enemy. Instead of explaining how Marines were killed, they say only “due to enemy action.”

I think this flyer is a good illustration of something Senator Rockefeller said today as he was lamenting his “wrong” vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq:

“We had this feeling we could be welcomed as liberators. Americans don’t know history, geography, ethnicity. The administration had no idea of what they were getting into in Iraq. We are not internationalists. We border on being isolationists. We don’t know anything about the Middle East.”

Indeed.

Noam Chomsky has started a blog, called Turning the Tide. Here’s an excerpt from his latest entry concerning the murderous Iraqi sanctions:

There is reason to believe — as Halliday and von Sponeck had argued — that if the vicious sanctions regime had been ended the population of Iraq would have been able to send Saddam Hussein to the same fate as other murderous gangsters supported by the US and UK: Ceausescu, Suharto, Marcos, Duvalier, Chun, Mobutu…. — quite a rogue’s gallery, some of them easily comparable to Saddam, to which new names are being added daily by the same Western leaders, whose values are unchanged. If so, both murderous regimes could have been ended without invasion. Postwar inquiries, such as David Kay’s, add weight to these beliefs by revealing how shaky Saddam’s control of the country was in the last few years.

We may have our own subjective judgments about this matter, but we should at least have the honesty to recognize that they are completely irrelevant. Completely. Unless the population is at least given the opportunity to overthrow a murderous tyrant, as they did in the case of the other members of the rogue’s gallery supported by the US and UK (including the current incumbents), there is no justification for resort to outside force to do so. Another truism, which has repeatedly been pointed out — and systematically ignored within the doctrinal system.

That is sufficient to undermine the arguments contrived by Blair and Bush, or their handlers, after the collapse of their official reasons for invasion: WMD and Iraq’s alleged ties to terror. On different grounds, these arguments have been thoroughly refuted by Human Rights Watch in the introduction to its latest annual report. But there are further considerations as well. It was predicted by just about every serious specialist that the invasion of Iraq would increase the threat of terror as well as proliferation of WMD. The first prediction has been amply verified, with terrible consequences and probably more to come, and Iraq itself has admittedly become a “terrorist haven” for the first time. The second prediction is also considered to have been confirmed by many regional specialists and strategic analysts, and is unfortunately all too plausible. There is more. Uncontroversially, the invasion struck a serious blow at the system of international law and institutions that offers at least some hope of saving the world from destruction. And though victors do not tabulate the consequences of their crimes, there is little doubt that the numbers of Iraqis killed is in the tens of thousands. And there is a good deal more.

Read the rest here.

William Marina posts the following on the Liberty & Power blog:

March 26, 2004 | Daily Mislead Archive

White House, 4/01: Focus on Bin Laden “A Mistake”

A previously forgotten report from April 2001 (four months before 9/11) shows that the Bush Administration officially declared it “a mistake” to focus “so much energy on Osama bin Laden.” The report directly contradicts the White House’s continued assertion that fighting terrorism was its “top priority” before the 9/11 attacks 1.

Specifically, on April 30, 2001, CNN reported that the Bush Administration’s release of the government’s annual terrorism report contained a serious change: “there was no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden” as there had been in previous years. When asked why the Administration had reduced the focus, “a senior Bush State Department official told CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden.” 2.

The move to downgrade the fight against Al Qaeda before 9/11 was not the only instance where the Administration ignored repeated warnings that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent 3. Specifically, the Associated Press reported in 2002 that “President Bush’s national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions” 4. Meanwhile, Newsweek has reported that internal government documents show that the Bush Administration moved to “de-emphasize” counterterrorism prior to 9/11 5. When “FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents” to deal with the problem, “they got shot down” by the White House.

Sources:

1. Press Briefing by Scott McClellan , 03/22/2004.

2. CNN, 04/30/2001.

3. Bush Was Warned of Hijackings Before 9/11; Lawmakers Want Public Inquiry , ABC News, 05/16/2002.

4. “Top security advisers met just twice on terrorism before Sept. 11 attacks “, Detroit News, 07/01/2002.

5. Freedom of Information Center , 05/27/2002.

Source links and more here.

Nir Rosen describes the remarkable progress U.S. social workers are making in Iraq:

In the beginning of the occupation I entered a taxi and asked the driver what he thought of the events in Iraq. He looked away and started crying. I asked him if somebody in his family had died. “We all died,” he told me. Now taxi drivers talk only of the latest explosion and how much they hate the Americans and want to kill them. One taxi driver drove by a mosque and saw Americans in the courtyard. “Look what they’re doing!” he shouted hysterically. “They even enter inside mosques! They are dirty Jews, I swear if I had an RPG now I would shoot them!”

Now tell me which of the two arguments from this earlier post sounds more plausible.

Can anyone read Juan Cole’s posts for today and not wonder if the civil war in Iraq has already begun?

Did the Republicans try to kill the 9/11 commission to prevent Richard Clarke from testifying? Is that why his book was in “security review” at the White House for three months?