Baghdad - The US troop buildup has brought violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks nationwide is running nearly double the year-ago pace.
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The data offer a sobering snapshot after an additional 30,000 U.S. troops began campaigns in February to regain control of the Baghdad area.
In street-level terms, it means that life for average Iraqis appears to be even more perilous and unpredictable.
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The findings include:
* Iraq is suffering about double the number of war-related deaths nationwide compared with last year - an average daily toll of 33 in 2006, and 62 so far this year.
* Nearly 1,000 more people have been killed in violence across Iraq in the first eight months of this year than in all of 2006. So far this year, about 14,800 people have died in war-related attacks and sectarian murders. The AP accounted for 13,811 deaths in 2006.
* Baghdad has gone from representing 76 percent of all civilian and police war-related deaths in Iraq in January to 52 percent in July, bringing it back to the same spot it was roughly a year ago. ...
Four of five members of the board of a campaign promoting President Bush's policies in the Iraq war are Republican Jews.
The board of "Freedom's Watch" includes Ari Fleischer, Bush's former press secretary; Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition; Bradley Blakeman, a senior White House staffer in Bush's first term; and Mel Sembler, a longtime RJC leader and former ambassador to Rome.
Brooks told JTA that the fifth member, William Weidner, a casino operator in Las Vegas, is not Jewish. However, Weidner's wife, Lynn, is Jewish and is active in that city's federation. Blakeman is the group's president.
Brooks said it would be a mistake to regard the group as having a Jewish direction.
"It's a coincidence that several of the board members are Jewish," he said, noting that half of the donors contributing to the group's first $15 million ad campaign are not Jewish. ...
There are now nearly as many private contractors in Iraq as there are U.S. soldiers - and a large percentage of them are private security guards equipped with automatic weapons, body armor, helicopters and bullet-proof trucks.
They operate with little or no supervision, accountable only to the firms employing them. And as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war, this private army has been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys.
Not one has faced charges or prosecution.
There is great confusion among legal experts and military officials about what laws - if any - apply to Americans in this force of at least 48,000.
They operate in a decidedly gray legal area. Unlike soldiers, they are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under a special provision secured by American-occupying forces, they are exempt from prosecution by Iraqis for crimes committed there. ...
NEW YORK It's not the first time that citizen "investigative journalists" have uncovered some embarrassing, or telling, nugget from the past that apparently remained buried for years. But it has happened again with the posting of a now wildly popular video on YouTube that shows Dick Cheney explaining in 1994 that trying to take over Iraq would be a bad idea and lead to a "quagmire."
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[CHENEY] "It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families -- it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right. "
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Although Iraq has a democratic government, Iraqi Christians were safer and had more protection under former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, said the future head of the Vatican's interreligious dialogue council.
During the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who will become head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue Sept. 1, had criticized the U.S. government's plan of preventative war and said a unilateral war against Iraq would be a "crime against peace."
In a recent interview with the Italian magazine 30 Giorni, the cardinal said his early criticisms had been prophetic.
"The facts speak for themselves. Alienating the international community (with the U.S. push for war) was a mistake," he said in the magazine's Aug. 10 issue. A copy of the interview was released in advance to journalists.
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Christians, "paradoxically, were more protected under the dictatorship," he said. ...
Armored Vehicles Chronically Late Inspector General Faults No-Bid Deals By Renae MerleWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, July 12, 2007; Page D01
The Pentagon inspector general's office has found that a program to deliver special armored vehicles to protect military personnel in Iraq from roadside bombs has been marred by delays and questionable contracting practices that may have endangered troops.
........ "I want to know if there is more influence-peddling involved" in awarding the contracts without competition, Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.), who requested the report, said in an interview. "We have to make sure a lesson was learned here."........
Force Protection continually failed to deliver vehicles on time even after the Marines gave the company money to upgrade its facilities. Of the 233 vehicles ordered from Force Protection, 60 percent were more than 30 days behind their original schedule, the report said. But under one of the contracts, the Marines declined to collect late fees that would have totaled $6.6 million because the contractor had "cash flow problems" and collecting the money would have caused the company "financial difficulty."
"Had Marine Corps officials provided the [extra money] to a competitor, the competitor may have been able to provide vehicles on an expedited schedule," the report said.
GENEVA (AP) - The situation for Iraqi children is getting worse and, in some respects, was better before the war began, a senior U.N. official said Monday.
"Children today are much worse off than they were a year ago, and they certainly are worse off than they were three years ago," said Dan Toole, director of emergency programs for the United Nations Children's Fund. He said Iraqis no longer have safe access to a government-funded food basket, established under Saddam Hussein to deal with international sanctions.
'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?' Interviews with US veterans show for the first time the pattern of brutality in Iraq By Leonard Doyle in Washington
07/12/07 "The Independent" -- -- It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances.
........... Through a combination of gung-ho recklessness and criminal behaviour born of panic, a narrative emerges of an army that frequently commits acts of cold-blooded violence. A number of interviewees revealed that the military will attempt to frame innocent bystanders as insurgents, often after panicked American troops have fired into groups of unarmed Iraqis. The veterans said the troops involved would round up any survivors and accuse them of being in the resistance while planting Kalashnikov AK47 rifles beside corpses to make it appear that they had died in combat.
............. Sgt John Bruhns, 29, of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armoured Division, described a typical raid. "You want to catch them off guard," he explained. "You want to catch them in their sleep ... You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall... Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds. You'll ask 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda?'"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sgt Bruhns said. "So you'll take his sofa cushions and dump them. You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it." And at the end, if the soldiers don't find anything, they depart with a "Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening".
........ 'Every person opened fire on this kid, using the biggest weapons we could find...'
........ "[The photo] was very graphic... They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head and [one soldier has] got a spoon. He's reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at the camera and smiling."
......... "The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population..."
............ "A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."
Nearly a third of the population of Iraq is in need of immediate emergency aid, according to a new report from Oxfam and a coalition of Iraqi NGOs.
The report said the government was failing to provide basics such as food and shelter for eight million people.
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It suggests that 70% of Iraq's 26.5m population are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50% prior to the invasion. Only 20% have access to effective sanitation.
Nearly 30% of children are malnourished, a sharp increase on the situation four years ago. Some 15% of Iraqis regularly cannot afford to eat.
The report also said 92% of Iraq's children suffered from learning problems.
It found that more than two million people have been displaced inside the country, while a further two million have fled to neighbouring countries. Many are living in dire poverty
With no end yet in sight for the long dark night of the Iraq war, The Nation magazine is coming out this week with an article that goes into great and disturbing detail about the brutal treatment of Iraqi civilians by some U.S. soldiers and marines. The article does not focus on the handful of atrocities that have gotten substantial press coverage, like the massacre in Haditha in November 2005.
Instead, based on interviews conducted on the record with dozens of American combat veterans of the war, the authors address what they describe as frequent acts of violence in which U.S. forces have abused or killed Iraqi civilians - men, women and children - with impunity. The combination of recklessness, wantonly destructive behavior born of panic and deliberate acts of cold-blooded violence by G.I.'s are believed to have cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the article says.
The soldiers interviewed said they believed that only a minority of U.S. troops engaged in objectionable behavior, but the toll of their actions has been huge. The article describes soldiers and marines frustrated and fearful in an alien environment in which the enemy hides among civilians and uses acts of terror as the primary tactic.
"The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effects of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis," said the authors, Chris Hedges, a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, and Laila al-Arian.
Jeff Englehart, a 26-year-old Army specialist from Grand Junction, Colo., said in the article: "I guess while I was there, the general attitude was a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi. You know, so what?"
For a lot of troops, he said, that attitude tended to morph into a debilitating sense of guilt after their return home. ............
WASHINGTON - JULY 25 - – Today, by a vote of 399-24, the House passed legislation introduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) to prevent permanent military bases in Iraq and bar U.S. control over Iraqi oil resources.
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“Mr. Speaker, the perception that the United States plans to maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq strengthens the insurgency and it fuels the violence against our troops. ...
