Would you cast the first stone, If you had to walk a mile in their shoes?

© of W.Gomez
I am referring to the soldiers who are fighting a war they don’t fully understand and yet. How are we to comprehend the madness that inflicted itself, through the actions of the soldiers stationed at Basra and the death of Mr Baha Musa?

TenPercent says it with passion

The sad episode is about Corporal Donald Payne, 34, of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, charged with inhuman treatment and the manslaughter of Baha Musa on September 15, 2003; perverting the course of justice; and with inhuman treatment of eight other named Iraqis. Lance Corporal Wayne Crowcroft, 21, and Private Darren Fallon, 22, of the same regiment, are charged with inhuman treatment of Iraqis.

[T]he Ministry of Defence bowed to pressure yesterday by agreeing to hold a public inquiry into the death of an Iraqi hotel worker in British custody in Basra.

Baha Musa suffered 93 injuries at the hands of British soldiers in September 2003. The 26-year-old receptionist was subjected to 36 hours of beatings and abusive treatment, including being double-hooded with hessian sacks in stifling conditions.

After a five-year campaign by the relatives of Mr Musa, Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, announced that the death is to be investigated at a full public inquiry conducted by a High Court judge.

Only one member of the British Army has ever been convicted of a charge linked to the death of Mr Musa. Corporal Donald Payne, of The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, pleaded guilty to inhuman treatment of persons protected by the Geneva Conventions and was sentenced at a court martial in April last year to 12 months in prison. He was also dismissed from the Army.

Article by Michael Evans Defence Editor. Read the whole report here

Retention Conflict Forces Recruitment

Does any life have worth? If so, what is that life worth?

The results range from just under 100,000 dead (civilians) to well over a million.

“We don’t do body counts” might be a good enough reason to distance the reality from the hype. But whilst the general public get disgruntled, the Army, Navy, and Air Force need to continue recruiting or they will face a depletion of personnel. In the meantime according to IBC (Iraq Body Count) keeps rising.

Do these numbers matter and is it pertinent to question the differentiating between services and civilian life.

Please recall that the evil dictator the western coalition needed to topple;”Saddam Hussein and his regime killed one million people over a 35-year period”

Guardian puts it as

(100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign in the 1980s; 400,000 in the war against Iran; 100,000 Shias in the suppressed uprising of 1991; and an unknown number executed in his prisons and torture chambers). Averaged over his time in power, the annual rate does not exceed 29,000.

An independent UK-based research group, calling itself the Iraq Body Count (IBC), collates all fatality reports in the media where there are two or more sources as well as figures from hospitals and other official sources. At least four household surveys have been done asking Iraqis to list the family members they have lost. The results have then been extrapolated to Iraq’s total population to give a nationwide estimate.

The results range from just under 100,000 dead to well over a million according to the report by Guardian.

RETENTION on the other had seems to be a real problem for the armed services.

14,000 people had left the army in the past year, meaning it had actually shrunk by 1,500.

“With ever increasing commitments and a shrinking army, the effects of overstretch are just going to get worse.”

Nick Harvey, for the Liberal Democrats, said “the painful reality” was that there were fewer army personnel than at any time since the conflict in Iraq in 2003.

The government needs to explain how the army is to cope with the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan with its forces so overstretched.

Reported in BBC

RECRUITMENT of course is one solution.

The army yesterday launched a £2m recruitment drive as polls showed that British soldiers were much more popular than the wars they are fighting.

The campaign drew immediate criticism, launched days before the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and at a time when the activities of the armed forces are coming under unusual scrutiny.

Brigadier Andrew Jackson, the army’s chief recruiter, said that on present figures there was likely to be a 10% shortfall in troops. Military chiefs have said they are concerned more about the difficulties in retaining trained soldiers than in attracting raw recruits.

THE CONFLICT it appears, grows in the UK

Members of the National Union of Teachers believe schools should not be “conduits” for Ministry of Defence “propaganda”.

Delegates at the NUT’s annual conference in Manchester will warn that “schools are being asked to play a partisan role in war” and should have no part in recruiting troops.

A motion to be debated at the conference calls for “the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq”.

It continues: “Teachers and schools should not be conduits for either the dissemination of MoD propaganda or the recruitment of military personnel.

“Conference therefore agrees to actively oppose military recruitment activities in schools across England and Wales.”

The union’s ruling executive does not support the call to oppose armed forces recruitment activities in schools and will put forward an amendment that would see this clause removed.

But the NUT leadership is concerned that some lesson materials prepared with MoD backing undermine the legal duty of schools to present controversial issues to children in a balanced way.

NUT general secretary Steve Sinnott wrote to Schools Secretary Ed Balls to complain about a lesson plan intended to help pupils learn the skill of “writing to argue”.

The plan focuses on the topic of “the ongoing occupation of Iraq by British armed forces”. Mr Sinnott said…..

So Says the news at Tiscali

While on the other side of the pond in USA we learn of the Berkeley’s Marine Corps Recruiting Center Controversy

and on On Youtube. Credit to bottomlineupfront. Thank you.

Does any life have worth? If so, what is that life worth?

Chickens: Insanity of the Cycle of Hatred

“What should our response be” was a questioned posed by Rev Wright on his exegesis of Psalm 137 especially verse 9 when considering 9/11.

The whole reason why Obama had to make that momentous speech of “We the People…”

Did FOX tell lies by their continuous loop of that famous statement.

ENJOY!

Journalist Vacancies in Iraq

Job title: Journalist

Closing date: 28th March 2008

Salary: On application

Full details: Our client, a nation in turmoil needs positive publicity and commentary.

As the principal Journalist, well, actually, you will be on your own. The advantage is you don’t have to buy anyone a round of drinks as only 128 Journalist have died.

You will be involved with a dynamic editorial team safe in their offices abroad i.e. London, New York, Washington or even Dubai and you will be able to experience life from an Iraqi perspective as you will be living outside the Green Zone.

You role will sourcing incisive news, features and analysis, interviewing the most exciting architects and designers of the emerging New Iraq.

In addition you will play a key role in ensuring the highest quality editorial standards of this beautifully presented paper.

You don’t need excellent credentials within the industry as a writer or as any writer, if you have these qualities and are breathing, then don´t hesitate to get in touch.

Ideally, you should provide your own hat & boots, a flak jacket and Hummer would be handy too.

Closing date is the 28th March 2008 but applications ASAP please.

Please send your CV and covering letter to Forces Recruitment, London

Please quote: ImustBeMadtobeaJournalistinIraq.co.uk when applying for this position.

Apply to:
Forces Recruitment
Balls of Steel

Attached is a promotional video to inspire you to act NOW.

Truth, lies bleeding on the streets

While the spin doctors tell us that life in Iraq is improving. Yet a female suicide bomber struck Shiite worshippers in the holy city of Karbala on Monday.

The dead/wounded toll rises from 8 to 15 to 35 to 43.

Do the numbers matter? Well it does, if you are one of the family of those blown up, but not for someone here in UK or US.

It isn’t even news anymore. As they say, talk to the hand

Img credit to Farm1

However there are people on this planet who will tell us that Tension Escalates in Iraq.

Reading between the lines, it is becoming obvious that Shock and Awe has had such a brilliant effect that this week, 5 years later as

Cheney’s motorcade zigzagged through Baghdad to meetings as helicopter gunships circled overhead. Explosions were heard in parts of the city, but none were near the vice president.

So what is Joe Public supposed to believe?

There appear to be two camps:

1. One that says one thing but knows another.

“The United States can do a lot for Iraq, but we cannot provide Iraq with an anchor in the Arab world, a kind of legitimacy for the new Iraqi project that comes from being fully integrated in its neighborhood,” said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified.

“And I think clearly some of our friends in the Arab world can do more on that score,” the official said of Cheney’s coming visit to Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Thanks to Faizshakir.

McCain, who arrived in Iraq on Sunday, told reporters that he also discussed with the Shiite leader the need for progress on political reforms, including laws on holding provincial elections and the equitable distribution of Iraq’s oil riches.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., speaking to reporters from Kuwait after a visit to Iraq, said Iraq should begin picking up more of the bills.

“We’re paying for things that Iraqis clearly should be paying for,” Levin said. “They have the capability, the surplus funds to do their own reconstruction, and to do their own weapons purchases and other things which we’re paying for and they need to pay for.”

Reported in

2. One that faces facts as they see it.

But some analysts have doubt about any major breakthroughs when Cheney talks about the matter with Arab countries.

“I don’t think that he’s going to be able to bring back anything meaningful because he’s got nothing to offer,” said Steven Simon, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“He represents a lame duck president, a floundering economy, a situation in which the U.S. for all its efforts in Iraq has no leverage on the government in Baghdad,” Simon noted

In the final analysis it all boils down to simple things like

The Iraqis do not yet have a law for sharing the nation’s oil wealth among the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, a law that the Bush administration believes will trigger multinational energy companies to invest in exploration and production in Iraq.

Five years and still nothing to show for what they really came for except perhaps as Desert peace eloquently puts it “The Invisible Wounds of the Iraq War”.

Remember Mr Joe Public, they did it on our behalf and we let them.

People sometimes say they respect the ’sincerity’ of those who display passionate conviction, even when what they are convinced about is visibly false. Tony Blair is regularly given credit for his sincerity, at least by the right-wing media, as he remains the only person in the world to believe in Iraqui weapons of mass destruction. But surely we ought to find passion and conviction in such a case dangerous and lamentable. The tendency of mind that they indicate is the vice of weakness, not the virtue of strength. Far from being a sign of sincerity, passionate conviction in these shadowy regions is a sign of weakness, of a secretly known infirmity of representational confidence. If we sympathize with the doughty Victorian W. K. Clifford, we will see it as a sign of something worse: a dereliction of cognitive duty, or a crime against the ethics of belief, and hence, eventually, a crime against humanity. (A paper by Simon Blackburn “Religion and Respect” Simon Blackburn is currently the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge)