Whenever a member of the Bush crime family addresses the American Enterprise Institute, the first thing they do is pat them selves on the back for liberating 28 million people.
Since our reporters can’t actually go anywhere in the country and show us the wrecked and bloody landscape, a few paragraphs from articles hidden on the internet will do that for us.
Everybody in Baghdad is very frightened. There are few friends of mine left in the city... He spoke now in a frightened voice and from London. He said I had not heard from him for a time because he had been kidnapped last summer. He was lucky to be alive since he came from a well-known Shia family. His kidnappers had whipped him and "then they came back to apologise because a cleric at their mosque told them it was wrong to whip anybody over 40 years of age."
More devastation on the flip.
This is what we call a CIVIL WAR. One that George W Bush and his cronies started.
Baghdad has broken up into a dozen different cities at war with each other. Walls are covered with slogans in black paint saying "Death to Spies". Any Shia caught in a Sunni district will be killed as a spy or because of his religion and vice versa. Each side has its checkpoints where armed men in civilian clothes casually ask drivers for their identity cards. They wave to one side those they suspect of being of the opposite religion who are then interrogated, tortured and killed. The checkpoints are difficult to avoid because they suddenly spring up without any advance warning. Some 30 to 50 bodies, often mutilated, are picked by the police every day.
The methods used by Sunni and Shia in these tit-for-tat killings are different. The Sunni are behind the car bombings and suicide bombers of Shia areas, targeting markets and religious processions to cause maximum casualties. On 3 February a man drove a truck into the vegetable market in the Shia district of Sadriya telling local militiamen that he was delivering cooking oil, cans of food and sacks of flour. Once in the market he detonated a ton of explosives hidden under these goods, killing 135 people and injuring 305 more. It was the deadliest single bomb since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. According to the UN some 3,000 people are murdered, mostly for sectarian reasons, in Iraq every month.
The Shia strike back by setting up more checkpoints and killing any Sunni they can identify. So many people now carry false identity papers to conceal their sectarian background that some of the men manning the posts carry a list of theological questions which a Sunni would not be able to answer. The Shia are in a better position to set up checkpoints than the Sunni because they effectively control the police commandos and many of the units of the Baghdad police. An official police checkpoint may simply be a death squad in uniform. One friend from the wholly Sunni al-Khadra district in West Baghdad told me: "The police commandos on the main highway running past al-Khadra are all Shia from the south and if they find anybody with a Sunni name like 'Othman' they will kill him. They arrested one of my cousins and accused him of being an insurgent. When he denied it they said 'well, you are a Sunni so you support them' and tortured him anyway with beatings and electricity."
Link here: http://www.counterpunch.com/...
And from Yahoo, which has been good at posting articles, but still, it’s a Yahoo article, not a NYT front page, not an NBC feature story, and certainly will not be found on Cable News.
Even the simple pleasure of sharing dinner with friends and relatives has fallen victim to fear of sectarian death squads and, more recently, by a strictly enforced 8:00 pm to 6:00 am curfew.
Picnics by the Tigris, a drive to Fallujah for a swim in the lake or a kebab, nights out at the theatre or movies, meeting friends at street cafes -- all now just memories blurred by car bombs, mortar fire and late night gunfire.
Visits to restaurants by night -- out; clubs where belly dancers would entertain until two or three o'clock in the morning -- closed; rooftop discos in big hotels -- in ruins.
An evening cruise on the Tigris that could turn into an all-night party -- forget it. Meeting at the club on a balmy evening for drinks with mates -- once upon a time maybe.
"We are now like camels carrying a heavy load and eating dry grass," said Ahmed al-Zahrawi, a 25-year-old teacher now working as a driver to support his family.
"There is no outside entertainment at all in Baghdad. Long before the curfew comes into effect we are all in our homes, watching television -- if we have electricity," he said.
link here:
http://news.yahoo.com/...