defending the indefensible part 1

[Steven Gaal]

defending the indefensible part ONE

( the first reply to this post part TWO,letter a ++ and letter b ++) I think both are connected but because of lenght need division. )

Who is behind the Assassinations of Iraq's Brains ??

April 9, 2010 at 6:40 pm | Posted in Turkmens | Leave a comment

Tags: Assassinatioin of Iraqi academics, CIA/Mossad, CIA/Mossad assassinations in Iraq, Iraqi academics assassinated during US-led occupation

Who is behind the Assassinations of Iraq’s

April 9, 2010

Just finished watching the Al-Jazeera documentary on the assassinations of Iraq’s brains – academics, scientists, medical doctors, researchers, thinkers….For some of their names, check an old post of mine called Brain Dead.There are different versions to as who is behind the wave of assassinations targeting Iraq’s top. One thing is absolutely sure, is that there is a DELIBERATE cover up of who is really behind it. And whistle blowers are known to be eliminated too in the process…

The official Iraqi government version is — The Baathists murdered their own and there was revenge from the Iraqi people, settling accounts with the previous regime. (2 very contradictory statements and why would Iraqi people take revenge on a medical doctor or a lecturer ?)

A few from this malignant government were interviewed. So called top people ranging from colonels in the police, to the ministry of interior to spokesmen from the current evil government of shiite sectarian vampires. They all gave lame justifications…and none really replied to the question of who is behind it.

Apart from the direct blaming of the Baathists and Al-Qaeda, allusions were made to the 150’000 mercenaries and intelligency agents who came with the filthy, barbaric, savage occupier called Americans. Allusions were made about CIA using other agents to eliminate Iraq’s scientists, doctors and academics, allusions were made about the Mossad, but these government officials except one woman who was a member of parliament and blew the whistle, and she got silenced with death threats… and I will get to her later on in the post —all of them did not say ONE word about their own militias and the role of Iranian secret operatives in the killing of Iraq’s brains.

But thankfully, the documentary did interview non government officials too, namely other academics who managed to escape, families of the victims, doctors in exile and one Iraqi who has been researching this topic and a Sunni cleric plus a Kurdish doctor. This latter blamed the Iraqi Resistance. Now how typical from a Kurd ! And why would the Iraqi Resistance eliminate Iraqis who are being killed by the Occupation ?!

In any case ALL AGREE and HAVE EVIDENCE that it was/is the CIA – Mossad – and Iranian intelligence behind these assassinations to which they added the SHIITE MILITIAS that form the current government – alongside them, including that Kurdish “doctor”, he eventually came round to the same conclusion at the end of the program.

I will go through it step by step as it is very important…the final conclusion will be self evident.

Let me first tackle the figures: Disputed figures too. Some like the Brussels Tribunal gives a figure of 431 brains killed. My sources tell me it’s 3’000. One guy by the name of Dr.Jalili who made a list of the names gives a figure 830 assassinated and gives a breakdown by field of specialization. And Jalili is ONLY referring to ACADEMICS here. In other words —medical doctors, and others are not included in this figure nor are the researchers and scientists working for the previous state institutions and are not necessarily academics. And this figure does NOT include ex -army officers.

One thing for sure and which the current Iranian sectarian shiite government vehemently denies is that prior to 2003, there were 45’0000 scientists in Iraq. Today there are virtually none left, they were either killed or are in exile or have been recuperated by the americans.

Who and how did they get to these brains ? Who had their names, who knew about their location, their field of expertise ?

Let’s go back to the beginning — to prior to 2003

1) The first to have access to all the names of the scientists were the UN inspectors. They had their names listed one by one. And they interviewed most of them, during the 12 years of inspecting Iraq for its non existent WMDs. In other words the americans were the first to know and the UN played its dirty role in helping eliminate Iraq’s brains.

2) In 2002, that same J.Biden, in a confidential memo, made the following offer – recruit 500 of these scientists to the US or face the fate of either murder or exile. Of course he did not say it in those exact words, it was worded in such a way as to imply –those who want to save their skin can do it now and that was in 2002.

3) In 2003, the filthy american Bremmer presiding over the CPA, (for which Allawi gladly worked) issued a decree by which ALL the SHIITE MILITIAS belonging to the IRANIAN parties that came WITH the american filth– to JOIN the Iraqi armed forces i.e the police, the army, the special forces.

4) again in 2003 , as I mentioned, and this was stated by a so called colonel in the CURRENT Iraqi armed forces – namely that 150’000 mercenaries came with the american filth under various names – NGOs, CONTRACTORS, SECURITY, and the like… and obviously they are not going to say — hello there, we are death squads. But this Iraqi colonel puppet cannot tell for sure who was who…and of course not one word about Iran. But he assured us that the day he finds out, he will let the Iraqi people and the families of the victims know.

5) one thing for which there is enough evidence is that Israel and the CIA operating through its paid agents in Iraq, had the Iraqi scientists as their prime target. There is also irrefutable evidence that Kurds were used to carry out these assassinations alongside the Mossad and the CIA. The known figure for the scientists murdered is 300.

6) another piece of information that is irrefutable, and for which strong evidence was given is that all the Iraqi ex army pilots were murdered by IRANIANS and their Shiite militias. This evidence is given by this woman, MP when she conducted a study in the neighborhood of Gazaliya with the families of the victims. In the North, ex-army officers were also murdered by Iranian agents. But not just ex army officers even men who worked in the police during the previous regime. Out of all the Iraqi ex- army pilots only one survived assassination.

7) another sure piece of evidence, is that ordinary academics, lecturers, had their houses raided, by men wearing the badges of the Ministry of Interior who was under the authority of the now minister of Finance called Solaghr Jaber – another pure Iranian and who was Al-Jaafari right hand man back in 2005. His men would storm the homes of these lecturers and kidnap them, torture them and kill them. This as per the testimonies of their families. Needless to say that the ministry of interior was/is a sectarian shiite torture dungeon under the direct orders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And Solaghr Jaber whose name has been changed to Al-Zubaidi is now part of the INA to which belongs Al-Jaafari, M.Al-Sadr, and of course Chalabi.

8) Another piece of the puzzle was made evident when inquiring into the murder of another ex-army officer in Samarra. This one was supposedly murdered by Al-Qaeda. According to another interviewed – a Sunni cleric– his group has strong proof that Al-Qaeda IRAQ was definitely infiltrated by Iran and US agents. Meaning that it was directed by these two countries. This is something that I have maintained throughout my posts – namely that AQ Iraq is definitely funded, backed, armed by both the americans and iranians. This is not something new – all Iraqis in Baghdad and Mosul will tell you the same thing. AQ is the handy excuse for the so -called insurgency…

9) Now let’s get to the known figures as compiled by Dr.M.Jalili, for the Academics alone. And this is what he has managed to gather to date and it is NOT exhaustive. I personally believe that the numbers are much higher than the ones given by both the Brusells Tribunal and Jalili. But still, they give a good indication of what has happened :

From the 830 ACADEMICS alone killed this is the repartition – it is not complete though as I did not manage to transcribe all the figures but it will give you a good indication.

62% of them were PhD and post Doctorates..

48 Doctors in Literature

84 Doctors in the Social Sciences

19 Doctors in Law

20 Doctors in History

18 Doctors in Chemistry

30 Doctors in Engineering

12 Doctors in Agricultural Sciences. (there are not Agriculture experts left in Iraq!)

118 Doctors in Pharmaceutical Sciences

65 Doctors in Medicine.

As I said, these are the figures I managed to retain, will add or correct once the documentary is out on youtube (if)

10) According to a Doctor in Pharmacy who was also interviewed there were 200 doctors in pharmacy in Iraq, today there is only 1 left. The rest were either killed or have fled.

11) Regarding medical doctors, and by medical doctors I mean SPECIALISTS and not just GPs. 8’0000 were driven out and 2’000 were murdered.

12) NOT included in the above are researchers, scientists, non senior lecturers, school teachers, assistant doctors and nurses…and of course high cadres from the ex-army whose number of murdered still remain unknown.

Conclusion

So who did it ?

Indications from the above short summary clearly points to the following culprits :

US/CIA , Israel/Mossad, Kurds, Iran/Shiite militias, AQ (US + Iran)

Why ?

Why would anyone kill a doctor, or a professor of agriculture, literature, engineering….? What is the purpose?

Regime Change? No way…

We all know by now that the aim of invading and occupying Iraq was NOT ONE) WMD or links with AQ and TWO, just regime change — for one can change a regime without inflicting such a deep structural devastation and erasure of a society’s fabric and intellectual property.

So why remains the question…

J. Baker did warn Tariq Aziz that Iraq will be taken to a pre-industrial age. Bremmer did say that bringing the population of Iraq to 5 to 6 millions was more than sufficient and IT IS HAPPENING. Madeleine Albright did say that killing 1Million Iraqi children was well worth it…but still, that question gnaws at me day and night…WHY ?

The Persians do have a historical hatred for Iraq and there is NO DOUBT about that. And that historical hatred dates to the not so great Cyrus.

The Jews too, have a historical longing and hatred towards Iraq, dating from Babylonian times…

But still this does not explain why the assassinations of Iraqi thinkers.

I found the most convincing explanation in what a doctor in pharmacy said in this documentary, Dr.Hitti if I recall correctly…He said there are three ways to ensure that a country is ERASED.

- Disease (look at the cancer rates in Iraq due to toxic waste by DU, napalm and Iranian dumping nuclear materials in Al-Anbar)

- Poverty ( Iraq has a poverty rate of over 60% in one of the supposedly richest oil reserves of the world)

- Ignorance (the assassinations of Iraq’s brains and their fleeing is meant to keep this state of ignorance…and the first indicators thus far since 2003, is that the number of illiterate children is one of the highest in the Arab world, after having eradicated illiteracy prior 2003)

But still, why would anyone want to ERASE Iraq — even after regime change and even after securing its riches. What is so special about Iraq ?

This is an obstinate question that refuses to leave me…I believe Saddam Hussein knew the answer and that is why he was murdered as well…

Painting :Iraqi female artist, Betool Fekaiki.

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FROM WAR WITHOUTEND FORUM

Zionist Mossad has assassinated 530 Iraq scientists and professors in last seven months.

Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Wednesday, 15 June 2005.

Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr,

member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. http://www.freearabvoice.org

There have been persistent reports for many months that Zionist hit squads have been active in Iraq assassinating Iraqi scientists and intellectuals. The latest chapter in that continuing story appeared on Tuesday, 14 June 2005, when the Palestine Information Center posted information that it said came from a report compiled by the United States Department of State and intended for the American President.

The report stated that agents of the Zionist foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, in cooperation with US military forces in Iraq had assassinated 350 Iraqi scientists and more than 200 university professors in scientific and other disciplines.

The Palestine Information Center quoted the report as saying that units of the Mossad and "Israeli" commandos had been operating on Iraqi territory for more than a year, the focus of their activities being the assassination of Iraqi scientists and intellectuals. The Zionists resorted to the large-scale assassination campaign, the report said, after the failure of American efforts that started immediately after the American occupation of Iraq aimed at attracting a number of Iraqi scientists to cooperate and go to work in the United States.

The report stated that although a few Iraqi scientists did go to work in US government centers, the vast majority of them later refused to cooperate with US scientists in various experiments and fled the United States for other countries.

Those Iraqis who chose to remain in their country were subjected to long sessions of interrogation and investigation by US occupation authorities. Some were subjected to torture. The Zionist Mossad, however, came to believe that allowing those scientists to remain alive could constitute a future threat to the security of the Zionist entity.

The Mossad believed that the best way to deal with Iraqi scientists was to physically eliminate them, taking advantage of the violence already present in the country.

The report said that more than seven months ago the American Defense Department expressed its agreement with the point of view of the Zionist Mossad. Along those lines it was decided to form Zionist commando detachments to assassinate Iraqi scientists. Those detachments were to be aided in their mission by US military forces. Accordingly, the American security service compiled and provided to the Zionists complete biographies on the scientists as well as ways to get to them.

This joint assassination campaign has been underway for more than seven months. Over that period of time 350 Iraqi scientists and 200 university professors have been assassinated in Iraqi streets when they were away from home. The report indicated that the families of the scientists believed that their loved ones had been killed or died in the crossfire of Resistance attacks.

The campaign to eliminate Iraqi scientists is still underway, according to the report. Systematic Zionist commando assassinations continue with the support and assistance of the Pentagon. The campaign reportedly has targeted more than 1,000 Iraqi scientists and it is said that one reason for some of the explosions in Iraqi streets that appear to be random and without clear target has been the assassination of the individuals on the US-supplied Mossad hit list.

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GLOBAL RESEARCH PART ONE

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(Muriel Mirak-Weissbach )

Iran did not start developing nuclear technology yesterday. In 1974, at the time of Shah Reza Pahlavi, a close ally of the West, Iran had outlined an ambitious program for introducing nuclear energy as a motor for economic development. The plan called for the installation of 23,000 MWe by 1994, equivalent to 40% of projected national energy consumption, through plants purchased from France, the U.S. and Germany. The famous Bushehr plant dates back to this era, when the German firm KWU had the contract. Iran participated in enrichment facilities in other countries, and was to purchase its enriched uranium abroad. (3)

This prompts the question: If the U.S. and Europe not only okayed an Iranian nuclear program, but organized and financed it under the Shah, why is this a casus belli today? Prof. Selim’s explanation is that the target of Western attacks against Iran’s program is not the physical program itself, but rather the scientific and technological know-how that it entails. Iranian scientists today possess this know-how, and that is what the Israelis, among others, object to. Israel in fact not only bombed the Iraqis’ Osirak reactor in 1981, but, more importantly, conducted a systematic campaign of targeted assassinations throughout the 1980s against leading Iraqi scientists, deploying hit squads to kill them whenever they ventured abroad for scientific conferences, etc. (4) The program launched under the Shah would have given Iran nuclear energy, but under the tight control of his Western sponsors. Therefore, it was no risk. Today it is a different story, a story entitled technological apartheid.

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3. Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani, “Iran,” in Nuclear Power in Developing Countries: An Analysis of Decision Making, Edited by James Everett Katz and Onkar S. Marwah, D.C. Heath and Company, Lexington, Massachusetts, Toronto, 1982, pp. 201-219.

4. See my book, Through the Wall of Fire, Armenia – Iraq – Palestine: From Wrath to Reconciliation, edition fischer, 2009, Part Two, and Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, Raymod William Baker, Shereen T. Ismael, and Tareq Y. Ismael, Pluto Press, 2010. ( Muriel Mirak-Weissbach )

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GLOBAL RESEARCH PART 2

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The US War against Iraq: The Destruction of a Civilization

by James Petras

Global Research, August 21, 2009

Introduction

The US seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent US occupation include the following (in order of importance):

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.

Top pro-Israeli policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.

The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War were civilian militarists (like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney) who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East. The civilian militarists sought to extend the American military base encirclement of Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil reserves as a pressure point against China. The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President Cheney’s past ties with the oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO of Halliburton’s giant military base contractor subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide military base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European and Asian competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein, and some of the Bush’s supporters in the oil industry had already engaged in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil industry was not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.

The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial occupation of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements. In response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a ‘divide and rule’ strategy (the so-called ‘El Salvador solution’ associated with the former ‘hot-spot’ Ambassador and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region and to encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians.

The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated. The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new mercenary army. The ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment. Under the cover of generalized ‘war against terror’, US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the puppet government – especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an independent secular republic.

The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war (by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country) as the first ‘domino’ in a series of war to ‘re-colonize’ the Middle East (in their words: “to re-draw the map”). They disguised their imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about ‘promoting democracies’ in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the un-democratic policies of their ‘homeland’ Israel over its subjugated Palestinians). Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests, the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported Israel’s savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push (from Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack against Iran.

The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South Asia believed that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed on the republic by the US and United Nations. In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society movements.

The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little known result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’ in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).

The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

The Destruction of a Modern Arab Civilization

Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th century. Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities (Christians, Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people and regime’s expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule and occupation.

A mere ‘regime change’ could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, ‘pre-national’ loyalties, in power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.

According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation – a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did not dispute.

Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University 70 students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that Iraq’s university system was on the brink of collapse. The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city streets.

The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan Daily News (www.daily.pk) on November 26, 2008. This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.

Assassinations

The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes – in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.

Baghdad was considered the ‘Paris’ of the Arab world, in terms of culture and art, science and education. In the 1970’s and 80’s, its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US ‘shock and awe’ campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe. Baghdad University was one of the most prestigious and productive universities in the Arab world. Many of its academics possessed doctoral degrees and engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious institutions. It taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the Middle East. Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions that starved Iraq during the 13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands of graduate students and young professionals came to Iraq for post-graduate training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received advanced medical training in its institutions. Many of its academics presented scientific papers at major international conferences and published in prestigious journals. Most important, Baghdad University trained and maintained a highly respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian discrimination – with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.

This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation, up to November 2008, eighty-three academics and researchers teaching at Baghdad University had been murdered and several thousand of their colleagues, students and family members were forced to flee.

The Selection of Assassinated Academics by Discipline

The November 2008 article published by the Pakistan Daily News lists the names of a total of 154 top Baghdad-based academics, renowned in their fields, who were murdered. Altogether, a total of 281 well-known intellectuals teaching at the top universities in Iraq fell victim to the ‘death squads’ under US occupation.

Prior to the US occupation, Baghdad University possessed the premier research and teaching medical faculty in the entire Middle East attracting hundreds of young doctors for advanced training. That program has been devastated during the rise of the US-death squad regime, with few prospects of recovery. Of those murdered, 25% (21) were the most senior professors and lecturers in the medical faculty of Baghdad University, the highest percentage of any faculty. The second highest percentage of butchered faculty were the professors and researchers from Baghdad University’s renowned engineering faculty (12), followed by the top academics in the humanities (10), physical and social sciences (8 senior academics each), education (5). The remaining top academics murdered at Baghdad University spread out among the agronomy, business, physical education, communications and religious studies faculties.

At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics were slaughtered, including 10 in the social sciences, 7 in the faculty of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical sciences and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s August 20, 2002 pre-invasion joke, “…one has to assume they (scientists) have not been playing ‘tiddlywinks’(a child’s game)”( justifying the bloody purge of Iraq’s scientists in physics and chemistry. An ominous signal of the academic bloodletting that followed the invasion.

Similar bloody purges of academics occurred in all the provincial universities: 127 senior academics and scientists were assassinated at the various well-regarded universities in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and elsewhere. The provincial universities with the highest number of murdered senior faculty members were in cities where the US and British military and their Kurdish mercenary allies were most active: Basra (35), Mosul (35), Diyala (15) and Al-Anbar (11).

The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out most of the killing of academics in the cities under US or ‘allied’ control. The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, cross-disciplinary drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab civilization. The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations were primitive, pre-modern, ethno-religious groups ‘set loose’ or instrumentalized by US military strategists to wipe out any politically conscious intellectuals and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.

In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate provided a list, which identified over 500 key Iraqi scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little doubt that this list became a core element in the US military’s hit list for eliminating Iraq’s scientific elite. In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi scientists and technicians who would have to be ‘contained’ to prevent their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created a ‘budget’ of hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi ‘Oil for Food’ money held by the United Nations to set up ‘civilian re-education’ programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers. These highly touted programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what one American policy expert termed Iraq’s ‘excess scientists, engineers and technicians’ in a Carnegie Endowment Paper (RANSAC Policy Update April 2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli Mossad’s covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.

The US ‘Surge’ and ‘Peak Assassination’ Campaigns: 2006-2007

The high tide of terror against academics coincides with the renewal of the US military offensive in Baghdad and in the provinces. Of the total number of assassinations of Baghdad-based academics for which a date is recorded (110 known intellectuals slaughtered), almost 80% (87) occurred in 2006 and 2007. A similar pattern is found in the provinces with 77% of a total of 84 scholars murdered outside of capital during the same period. The pattern is clear: the murder rate of academics grows as the occupying US forces organize a mercenary Iraqi military and police force and provide money for the training and recruitment of rival Shia and Sunni tribesmen and militia as a means of decreasing American casualties and of purging potential dissident critics of the occupation.

The terror campaign against academics intensified in mid-2005 and reached its peak in 2006-2007, leading to the mass flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi scholars, scientists, professionals and their families overseas. Entire university medical school faculties have become refugees in Syria and elsewhere. Those who could not afford to abandon elderly parents or relatives and remained in Iraq have taken extraordinary measures to hide their identities. Some have chosen to collaborate with the US occupation forces or the puppet regime in the hope of being protected or allowed to immigrate with their families to the US or Europe, although the Europeans, especially the British are disinclined to accept Iraqi scholars. After 2008, there has been a sharp decline in the murder of academics – with only 4 assassinated that year. This reflects the massive flight of Iraqi intellectuals living abroad or in hiding rather than any change of policy on the part of the US and its mercenary puppets. As a result, Iraq’s research facilities have been decimated. The lives of those remaining support staff, including technicians, librarians and students have been devastated with few prospects for future employment.

The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush and Obama have declared, is a ‘success’ – an independent nation of 23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime is ensconced, colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have been put up for sale. All of Iraq’s nationalist laws protecting its patrimony, its cultural treasures and national resources, have been annulled. The occupiers have imposed a ‘constitution’ favoring the US Empire. Israel and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama celebrate the demise of a modern adversary…and the conversion of Iraq into a cultural-political desert. In line with an alleged agreement made by the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted treasures of ancient Mesopotamia have ‘found’ their way into the collections of the elite in London, New York and elsewhere. The collectors can now anticipate the pillage of Iran.

Warning to Iran

The US invasion, occupation and destruction of a modern, scientific-cultural civilization, such as existed in Iraq, is a prelude of what the people of Iran can expect if and when a US-Israeli military attack occurs. The imperial threat to the cultural-scientific foundations of the Iranian nation has been totally absent from the narrative among the affluent Iranian student protesters and their US-funded NGO’s during their post-election ‘Lipstick Revolution’ protests. They should bear in mind that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves with a fatally misplaced optimism that ‘at least we are not like Afghanistan’. The same elite are now in squalid refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else in the Middle East. The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to transform Iraq in the image of ‘our newly liberated Afghanistan’ has been fulfilled. And reports that the US Administration advisers had reviewed the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian scientists should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Teheran to seriously ponder the lesson of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-2007.

Conclusion

What does the United States (and Britain and Israel) gain from establishing a retrograde client regime, based on medieval ethno-clerical socio-political structures in Iraq? First and foremost, Iraq has become an outpost for empire. Secondly, it is a weak and backward regime incapable of challenging Israeli economic and military dominance in the region and unwilling to question the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian Arabs from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Thirdly, the destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation.

In the mid 19th Century, after the revolutions of 1848, the conservative French sociologist Emil Durkheim recognized that the European bourgeoisie was confronted with rising class conflict and an increasing anti-capitalist working class. Durkheim noted that, whatever its philosophical misgivings about religion and clericalism, the bourgeoisie would have to use the myths of traditional religion to ‘create’ social cohesion and undercut class polarization. He called on the educated and sophisticated Parisian capitalist class to forego its rejection of obscurantist religious dogma in favor of instrumentalizing religion as a tool to maintain its political dominance. In the same way, US strategists, including the Pentagon-Zionists, have instrumentalized the tribal-mullah, ethno-religious forces to destroy the secular national political leadership and advanced culture of Iraq in order to consolidate imperial rule – even if this strategy called for the killing off of the scientific and professional classes. Contemporary US imperial rule is based on supporting the socially and politically most backward sectors of society and applying the most advanced technology of warfare.

Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled for centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in order to impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is central to Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads made up of Kurds and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and research institutions of that shattered nation.

The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction of a modern secular republic. The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical ‘howling wilderness’ soaked in the blood of Iraq’s precious scholars) is controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as ‘Iraqi officers’, tribal and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures. They operate under the guidance and direction of West Point graduates holding ‘blue-prints for empire’, formulated by graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American and European multi-national corporations.

This is called ‘combined and uneven development’: The marriage of fundamentalist mullahs with Ivy League Zionists at the service of the US.

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Edited April 25, 2011 by Steven Gaal

[Steven Gaal]

defending the indefensible PART TWO the method (letter a ++ and then letter b ++ )

Part TWO the method letter a ++

Defending the indefensible: a how-to guide

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - 2:55 PM

Powerful states often do bad things. When they do, government officials and sympathizers inevitably try to defend their conduct, even when those actions are clearly wrong or obviously counterproductive. This is called being an "apologist," although people who do this rarely apologize for much of anything.

Some readers out there may aspire to careers in foreign policy, and you may be called upon to perform these duties as part of your professional obligations. Moreover, all of us need to be able to spot the rhetorical ploys that governments use to justify their own misconduct. To help students prepare for future acts of diplomatic casuistry, and to raise public consciousness about these tactics, I offer as a public service this handy 21-step guide: "How to Defend the Indefensible and Get Away With It." The connection to recent events is obvious, but such practices are commonplace in many countries and widely practiced by non-state actors as well.

Here are my 21 handy talking-points when you need to apply the whitewash:

1. We didn't do it! (Denials usually don't work, but it's worth a try).

2. We know you think we did it but we aren't admitting anything.

3. Actually, maybe we did do something but not what we are accused of doing.

4. Ok, we did it but it wasn't that bad ("waterboarding isn't really torture, you know").

5. Well, maybe it was pretty bad but it was justified or necessary. (We only torture terrorists, or suspected terrorists, or people who might know a terrorist…")

6. What we did was really quite restrained, when you consider how powerful we really are. I mean, we could have done something even worse.

7. Besides, what we did was technically legal under some interpretations of international law (or at least as our lawyers interpret the law as it applies to us.)

8. Don't forget: the other side is much worse. In fact, they're evil. Really.

9. Plus, they started it.

10. And remember: We are the good guys. We are not morally equivalent to the bad guys no matter what we did. Only morally obtuse, misguided critics could fail to see this fundamental distinction between Them and Us.

11. The results may have been imperfect, but our intentions were noble. (Invading Iraq may have resulted in tens of thousands of dead and wounded and millions of refugees, but we meant well.)

12. We have to do things like this to maintain our credibility. You don't want to encourage those bad guys, do you?

13. Especially because the only language the other side understands is force.

14. In fact, it was imperative to teach them a lesson. For the Nth time.

15. If we hadn't done this to them they would undoubtedly have done something even worse to us. Well, maybe not. But who could take that chance?

16. In fact, no responsible government could have acted otherwise in the face of such provocation.

17. Plus, we had no choice. What we did may have been awful, but all other policy options had failed and/or nothing else would have worked.

18. It's a tough world out there and Serious People understand that sometimes you have to do these things. Only ignorant idealists, terrorist sympathizers, craven appeasers and/or treasonous liberals would question our actions.

19. In fact, whatever we did will be worth it eventually, and someday the rest of the world will thank us.

20. We are the victims of a double-standard. Other states do the same things (or worse) and nobody complains about them. What we did was therefore permissible.

21. And if you keep criticizing us, we'll get really upset and then we might do something really crazy. You don't want that, do you?

Repeat as necessary

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PART TWO the method letter b ++

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FROM EU TIMES

Israel paying agents to post pro Israel Propaganda on Internet forums & blogs!

The Foreign Ministry unveiled a new plan this week: Paying talkbackers to post pro-Israel responses on websites worldwide. A total of NIS 600,000 (roughly $150,000) will be earmarked to the establishment of an “Internet warfare” squad.

The Foreign Ministry intends to hire young people who speak at least one language and who study communication, political science, or law – or alternately, Israelis with military experience gained at units dealing with information analysis.

Beyond the fact that these job requirements reveal a basic lack of understanding in respect to the dynamics of the online discourse – the project’s manager argued that “adults don’t know how to blog” – they are not too relevant either. An effective talkbacker does not need a law degree or military experience. He merely needs to care about the subject he writes about.

The sad truth is that had Israeli citizens believed that their State is doing the right thing, they would have made sure to explain it out of their own accord. Without being paid.

Foreign Ministry officials are fighting what they see as a terrible and scary monster: the Palestinian public relations monster. Yet nothing can be done to defeat it, regardless of how many foolish inventions will be introduced and how many bright communication students will be hired.

The reason is that good PR cannot make the reality in the occupied territories prettier. Children are being killed, homes are being bombed, and families are starved. Yet nonetheless, the Foreign Ministry wants to try to change the situation. And they have willing partners. “Where do I submit a CV?” wrote one respondent. “I’m fluent in several languages and I’m able to spew forth bullxxxx for hours on end.”

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Edited April 25, 2011 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

Is there any confirmation that so many academics have been murdered or that they disproportionately are victims or as to who is responsible?