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POPSChinook Goes Down in Iraq Comments from troops; I read that the Chinook had a hard landing... (0.00 / 0) but that doesn't mean that it wasn't taking/evading fire. If any of you are so inclined, please pray for the pilots and passengers and their families. Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible. ~A. Philip Randolph maintenance. (4.00 / 1) Was this a maintenance issue? We already know that the troops and equipment are stretched too thin. Last read I had was "mechanical failure"... (0.00 / 0) maybe read it a icasualties. Helos and Sand. (4.00 / 1) Not a good combo. And to overuse them in a sandy enviornment is not good either. Drought has added to the 'usual' problems... (0.00 / 0) dust, haze, and sand storms. I just got word that the official word (0.00 / 0) is mechanical failure. Of course it could be a while for the safety officer and tactical ops officer to investigate and pin down exactly what the malfunction was...
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POPSSafer Iraq Attracts Foreign Investors Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's crackdown on Shiite militias this Spring led to a thaw in relations with Sunni governments in the Gulf. That has encouraged investors such as Aqeela to turn to Iraq without fear of falling out of favor with their own governments, says Majed Michel, vice president of the Iraqi American Chamber of Commerce. The projects seek to address long-standing needs in Iraq, such as a severe housing shortage and under-investment in public utilities. Najaf is visited by millions of Shiite tourists a year but infrastructure there is poor. "This is an extraordinarily undercapitalized society," said Todd Schwartz, an economic counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. "There's no question that Iraq can absorb $74 billion and hundreds of billions more." There is plenty of money available as well, added Schwartz, in Gulf monarchies awash in petrodollars.
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POPSForeign Investments Flow Into Iraq The need for housing and building up the infrastructure in Iraq is drawing the attention and dollars of foreign investors. One major obstacle however: Getting projects approved by the government. Talk about red tape.
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POPSU.S. Military Frees 10,000 Detainees in Iraq Detainees are sometimes released for political purposes. For instance, the recent amnesty law which released thousands of suspected insurgents in an effort to bring certain Sunni groups back into the government. They are also released when it is determined they held no intelligence value, or posed no threat. In Iraq, the average time of detention is just under one year. Of those now in detention, 12 are women, more than 300 are juveniles, 200 are third country nationals and about 200 are over the age of 60, the US military statement said.
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POPS The Goodwill Of Nancy Pelosi continued when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities-the Iranians.” Of course, Basra had nothing to do with the surge in the first place and in the second Iran has been, along with al Qaeda, the chief facilitator of terrorism in post-Saddam Iraq. You’d think after giving credit for American success to America’s sworn enemies, the Speaker of the House would back off from flattering the mullahs. She might even attempt to clarify or correct the record. A mere “‘goodwill’ was the wrong term” would have gone a long way. Yet no clarification or correction was issued. And Pelosi’s comments this morning confirm the reason: She gives Iran the benefit of the doubt. After the kidnappings, the terrorist activities that have killed Americans over three decades, the threats to destroy Israel, the attempts to destroy Iraq, the training and support of Hezbollah, the torture and murder of thousands of Iranians,
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POPSUK PM Brown Talks Troop Withdrawal Over at Political Wire, Taegan Goddard calls this " Another Gift for Obama ," noting that this has happened just "days in advance of Sen. Barack Obama's stop in London." John McCain becomes even more isolated in the world.
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POPSMugtada al-Sadr keeps the truce for now.... Cont.... Such tales abound. Sudani said she'd heard of troops bursting into a woman's home and arresting her four sons, as a soldier threw the mother to the ground and put his boot on her head. Iraqi troops are said to have seized gasoline canisters from a Sadr City resident and distributed them to others, claiming they were from the government. Ali Jassim, 30, another resident, said his cousin's phone rang at a checkpoint with a ringtone containing a chant about Sadr. When soldiers heard it, they slapped him, he said. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, has suffered a series of setbacks since last spring. It lost control of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, and the southern city of Amara after Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki ordered his forces to retake those areas. Many charge that Maliki is waging a political war against his former allies in time for fall's provincial elections.
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POPSText of McCain Editorial rejected by the NY Times This editorial was a written response to Obama's editorial. It was rejected. continuing.. "Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism."
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POPSIranian Trade With Iraq But since Saddam's ouster, there has been deluge of Iranian goods into the country, particularly in the strip from Baghdad to Basra, said anthropologist Hosham Dawod from the French national center for scientific research. "Some sources quote figures such as $8 billion," for the value of Iranian imports in 2008, he said, but added there were no official figures on import levels. 'Iranian products are not truly political tools' - shoppers in the Shiite district of Kadhimiyya in northwest Baghdad snatch up not only Iranian-made cookers, fridges, air conditioning units and generators, but also toys, rugs and medicines.
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POPSBoy 14 Forced into Oral Sex on another Prisoner!!! Mazin Younis, of the Iraqi League , who has travelled in Basra collecting witness statements of allegations of abuse, says he now has "more than 80" cases involving allegations against British troops. "Every single time I uncover a personal story of torture and humiliation in Iraq, I think to myself that I have seen the worst there is," Mr Younis added. "Then I hear the next story. "Hassan shook with emotion and humiliation as he described to me the treatment he suffered at the hands of British soldiers five years ago. It had taken constant prompting and repeated reminders about the importance of detail before Hassan felt brave enough to describe how he was forced to engage in oral sex with his friend Tariq while their British captors laughed raucously and took photographs."
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POPSSome Iraqi News Not Reported By "The Media" Meanwhile Bill Roggio reports that a released Gitmo detainee is back to the front and is responsible for attacks inside Iraq : The detainee, Abdullah Salih al Ajmi, drove a armored truck packed with explosives into a Iraqi army base and detonated it, killing 13 Iraqi army soldiers and wounding 42. http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/06/released_guantanamo.php Just the tip of the iceberg I’m afraid after our courts release a large chunk of these guys. Al Qaeda in Iraq, through its puppet organization the Islamic State of Iraq, released its latest propaganda video on June 23. The video contains a montage of attacks throughout Iraq, and features two Kuwaiti al Qaeda operatives who conducted strikes in Mosul. One of the operatives was released from the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Islamic State of Iraq used footage taken at Combat Outpost Inman by this reporter in Mosul in March of this year.
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POPSwoman blows up are we seeing a new, dehumanising shift in media coverage? suicide bombers 'blow up' now? i thought the bombers 'blew themselves up'.
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POPSBritish Set to Leave Iraq, Abandoning US Occupation First the Aussies, now the Brits. Suddenly the US has no major "international forces" but its own to occupy Iraq. This is a rebuke to the Blair-Bush alliance, and the "liberal" (neo-conned) Labor Party in the UK has suffered for the Iraq scheme (note that democrats) which the people know was built on lies and 9/11 propaganda for a "war on terrorism". This puts all eyes and pressure on the US whose "international coalition of the willing" has fallen apart.
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POPSObama's Plan For Defeat But Obama and the Democrats would forfeit every one of these successes to a declared policy of fixed and unconditional withdrawal. The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions. Obama will keep pulling out his 2002 speech opposing the war. But McCain's case is simple. Is not Obama's central mantra that this election is about the future not the past? It is about 2009, not 2002. Obama promises that upon his inauguration, he will order the Joint Chiefs to bring him a plan for withdrawal from Iraq within 16 months. If McCain cannot take to the American people the case for the folly of that policy, he will not be president. Nor should he be.
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POPSEat Crow, liberal Iraqi war skeptics If Democrats had won the White House in 2004, the jihadists might have succeeded. The idiotic liberals are still for retreat in the face of victory. The US decision to "stay the course" in the Iraq war, which was also widely mocked and criticized, served to thoroughly demoralize the jihadist movement. Another example of why liberals are unfit to run this country, unless you want to run it into the ground.
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POPSThe Iraqi Upturn This started out as a "good news" clip...and it is! But is the Washington Post suggesting that *President Obama* can take credit for the withdrawal?
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POPSIslam: A Cover for Crimes Against Humanity Can anyone imagine some cat up there who was actually in charge and appointed this filthy little slob to be his overseer of the underlings, making sure they all please this psychotic deity? Uhhhmm, me neither. So, sanctioned by this jackass of a god, this bastard rapes and kills for a living. Just another, in the long list of examples of why religion is the worse idea in the history of humanity. Call superman what you like, Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, Yehovah, Whatevah ... just call any of these names and your criminal psychosis becomes licensed.
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POPSMilitary Matters: Iraq state fantasy The truth about Iraq and 4GW conflicts that the GOP and the Pentagon (and their supporters) don't get: "Because there is no state in Iraq, there is also no government. Orders given in Baghdad have no meaning, because there are no state institutions to carry them out. The governmental positions of Iraqi leaders have no substance. Their power is a function of their relationship to various militias, not of their offices. Maliki has no militia, which means he is a figurehead. "
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POPSOutrage: RIP RAND ABDEL-QADER She (the author) says it's not about Islam but i disagree. As the murderer says himself "I had the support of ALL my friends"....oh ya...the support of the police as well. http://timesonline.typepad.com/faith/2008/05/honour-killing.html
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POPSHonor Killing - Religion at Work We always hear of cultural preservation. Maybe we ought to hear more of cultural castigation. Aspects of some cultures are so primitive, so mired in backwards, ignorant superstition that they deserve to be derided and scorned by all peoples of more enlightened cultures. This story sickens me on many levels.
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POPSAnti-Jihad 'University': Bringing Insurgents In From The Cold
While I was not permitted to talk privately with detainees, I visited both Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, and remote Camp Bucca, near Basra in southern Iraq. A major tipping point in the program, say officers, was when detainees began volunteering for the classes being offered. Although al-Qaida detainees and the Takfiris (another group of religious extremists) pressured fellow Iraqis against participating in the very popular religious discussions, over 3,000 detainees have done so. “After Iraqis here learn how to read and write, they can read the Koran themselves for the first time,” says Sheikh Ali, a Sunni who counsels detainees and who, like most of the Iraqis working in the program, declined to have his surname used and must live in an American-guarded compound to avoid reprisals. “I’ve seen detainees break down and cry when they realize that the conduct they thought was sanctioned by God is actually a sin.”
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