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"I HOPE IT'S YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS THAT DIE"
- US Representative Dana Rohrabacker
By US Army Reserves Colonel (Retired) Ann Wright,
After Downing Street
Rohrabacher said if European countries did not cooperate with the United States and go along with whatever the Bush administration wanted, they were condemning their countrymen to death by not using extralegal methods to imprison terrorist suspects. When citizens attending the hearing, including members of Codepink Women for Peace and Veterans for Peaceard Rohrabacher's statement, they collectively groaned. Then, much to the shock and disbelief of everyone in the hearing room, Rorhbacker said to those who had expressed displeasure at his statements:
"I hope it's your family members that die when terrorists strike."
At that point, I had had enough of Rohrabacher. I stood up and said "I did not serve 29 years in the US military and 16 years in the US diplomatic corps to see demise of the rule of law and violation of our own laws. Rohrback's statements are outrageous. No wonder the world hates us!"
Chairman Delahunt gaveled for me to stop speaking and I was escorted by the police out of the committee room. I was not arrested.
Remarkably, I do agree with one thing Rohrabacker said. "They hate us."
Rohrabacker finished his sentence with "They hate us because they hate our way of life." Unfortunately, many people do hate us, but it's not for our way of life.
Its for exactly the talk and actions that Rohrabacker and the Bush administration represent: illegal and unlawful actions, an arrogant attitude that America is always right and everyone else is wrong, that the world's resources are for the exclusive use of the United States and we have the right to invade and occupy any country."
Until we change the manner in which Presidential administrations and the Congress operate and the way we approach our membership in the community of nations, the world will continue to question what America stands for.
About the Author: Ann Wright retired as a Colonel after serving 13 years on active duty and 16 years in the US Army Reserves. After 16 years in the US diplomatic corps, she resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She had been assigned in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. She helped reopen the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December, 2001.
US 'planning to keep 50,000
troops in Iraq for many years'
Francis Harris in Washington,
The Telegraph
troops in Iraq for many years'
Francis Harris in Washington,
The Telegraph
June 12, 2006 -- -- America plans to retain a garrison of 50,000 troops, one tenth of its entire army, in Iraq for years to come, according to US media reports.
The revelation came as George W Bush summoned his top political, military and intelligence aides to a summit on Iraq's future today at the presidential retreat at Camp David.
Tomorrow the Americans will talk by video link to Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, and members of his cabinet, as well as American military commanders in Iraq.
The meeting marks the highest profile discussion of Iraq's future so far, and reflects the Bush administration's determination to exploit the two most promising developments in Iraq for many months - the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qa'eda in Iraq, and the completion of the first permanent post-war cabinet.
Mr Bush said the meeting would decide "how to best deploy America's resources in Iraq and achieve our shared goal of an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself".
But despite fierce domestic pressure to reduce troop levels before November's critical mid-term elections, there were growing signals that Gen George Casey, America's Iraq commander, may raise troop levels in the short-term.
Mr Bush said in his weekend radio address that "violence in Iraq may escalate" as terrorists tried to prove that they had survived the loss of their leader.
American commanders are also worried by the situation in the Sunni areas at the heart of the insurgency, where American units have complained of a shortage of men.
Mr Maliki pledged in a Washington Post article to confront the Shia militia, but his plan to "re-establish a state monopoly on weapons" could well generate a confrontation between ultra-religious gunmen and the fledgling Iraq security forces.
America's military would be drawn into any defining battle over who rules Iraq.
Gen Casey has already summoned his main reserve unit, a 3,500-man armoured brigade based in Kuwait and has alerted a Germany-based brigade that it may be needed soon.
Military planners have begun to assess the costs of keeping a 50,000-man force in Iraq for a protracted period of time. At present the total number of serving American troops is about 500,000.
The plan has not yet received presidential approval. But it would fit with the administration's belief that while troops numbers will fall, American forces will have to remain in Iraq beyond Mr Bush's departure from the White House in early 2009.
Military analysts have noted that significant American spending is already being committed to permanent bases in Iraq. They say Iraq's military may soon be able to fight by itself, but it cannot feed or supply itself and it has no air force to speak of.
The Camp David meeting will be attended by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, Gen Michael Hayden, the CIA director and Gen Peter Pace, America's top soldier.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m23920&l=i&size=1&hd=0
5 US Personnel Killed in Iraq
By James Rainey
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 19 May 2006
Military leaders call a recent increase in violence an attempt by insurgents to derail the new government, which is set to be announced.
Baghdad - Four American soldiers and a sailor were slain in Iraq over the last two days, the U.S. military said Thursday, the latest in a series of stepped-up attacks in the last two months.
A roadside bomb killed the soldiers and their Iraqi interpreter northwest of Baghdad on Thursday. The sailor died in Al Anbar province, west of the capital, a day earlier.
U.S. service members have been dying at a rate of 2 1/2 a day in May, an increase over late 2005 and early this year but not as high as during some periods earlier in the war.
Military leaders have described the increased violence against Americans and Iraqis as insurgents' attempt to derail the government that Prime Minister-designate Nouri Maliki is expected to announce Saturday.
The U.S. military's new chief spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, urged the media to focus on Iraqis' improving participation in national security. He said Iraqis had been phoning in tips to a government hotline at a record pace, helping to prevent even greater violence.
Caldwell said he believed the greater number of calls did not reflect an increase in violence but rather underscored a feeling by Iraqis that they "are tired of the violence and they realize there is somebody who will show up and take some action."
The general described recent raids by U.S. and Iraqi forces, one of which led to the seizure of a large weapons cache on the grounds of a Baghdad mosque and the other to the capture of a cell leader who made car bombs.
The U.S. military reported two other successes Thursday, saying it had killed several insurgents who had been launching attacks from an abandoned train station in Ramadi, and intervened to prevent a roadside bombing and ambush in Mosul, killing three rebels.
One of the first tasks for Maliki and his new government will be to recommend when Iraqi military and police units are ready to assume national security responsibility from the U.S.
The governor of Al Anbar made his own recommendation Thursday, saying he wanted the Americans to withdraw from Ramadi and other cities.
Gov. Mamoun Sami Rasheed said U.S. forces had been unable to bring stability to the region racked by the Sunni Arab-led insurgency. Al Anbar residents, he said, "have suffered a lot because of the military operations." American commanders did not immediately respond.
Violence and intimidation against Iraqis, both civilian and uniformed, continued Thursday.
Fifteen members of the national tae kwon do team were kidnapped on the highway between Fallouja and Ramadi. A $100,000 ransom was demanded for the athletes, who were returning from a competition in Jordan, a spokesman for Iraq's Olympic committee said.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, three people were killed. One was a local political activist and the others were a teacher and student at a vocational school.
In Basra, Police Chief Hassan Suwadi escaped an assassination attempt near his home.
Baghdad remained the focal point of the deadliest violence.
Two roadside bombs apparently aimed at a police convoy exploded in the Waziriya district, killing seven. On the southern end of the capital, insurgents ambushed a minivan and killed six people, local authorities said.
Dead Soldiers Flown Home as British Presence in Basra Is Questioned
By Kim Sengupta
The Independent UK
Friday 19 May 2006
Five military coffins, bearing the latest British dead from Iraq, arrived home yesterday. At the same time, 105 people died during two days of carnage in Afghanistan - the next battleground for British forces.
The bodies returning were of five personnel killed when their helicopter was shot down north of Basra. They included Flt-Lt Sarah Mulvihill, 32, the first British woman to be killed in the conflict.
Her husband, Lee, watched as the coffins, covered in Union flags, which had left Iraq after a ceremony at sunset in Basra in a C-17 Globemaster, were carried to waiting hearses at RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, with the band of Britannia Royal Naval College playing laments.
He described her as a "best friend" and "beloved wife", whose loss "has greatly affected and impacted on more people than anyone can comprehend."
Group-Cpt Duncan Welham, station commander of RAF Benson in Oxfordshire, where Flt-Lt Mulvihill was based, added: "Sarah was one the RAF's finest: courageous, upbeat, unselfish."
The casualties had come in a particularly grim week for British troops in the country, amid sweeping violence which shows no signs of abating three years after the American and British "liberation". There were seven deaths and four injuries.
North-west of Baghdad yesterday, four American soldiers and their Iraqi interpreter died when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle, taking the death toll of US military to 2,455 since the beginning of the Iraq war.
In Basra, where most of Britain's 8,000 soldiers are based, General Hassan Swadi, chief of the police force, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when a roadside bomb hit his convoy as he was going to work.
Despite assurances by the Defence minister Des Browne that the situation was under control while visiting the city, the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, discussed the situation in Basra with his Shia and Sunni Vice-Presidents, Adil Abdul-Mahdi and Tariq al-Hashimi.
"We are following this issue closely, not because other parts of Iraq are violence-free, but because of the importance of the city with regard to the security of the south as a whole and the economy of Iraq," Mr Abdul-Mahdi said.
Hundreds of people have staged demonstrations in recent days and Basra's governor fired the provincial police chief last week amid charges that he was doing little to control the violence.
Afghanistan, meanwhile, experienced some of the fiercest fighting since the toppling of the Taliban and their al-Qa'ida allies four years ago. At least 100 people died when, in the course of 48 hours, a full-scale assault was made on a town by a resurgent Taliban; coalition forces were engaged in several firefights; and two suicide-bomb attacks were made as American forces carried out air strikes.
There was also political fallout from the Iraqi side of the "war on terror". In Rome, the new Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, pledged to bring all Italian troops home as soon as possible. "We consider the war in Iraq and the occupation of the country a great error" he said. " It has not resolved, but complicated, the situation of security. Terrorism has found a new base in Iraq and new excuses for attacks both inside and outside the country."
In London, officials have repeatedly stressed that British forces will " see it through to the end" in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military commanders, however, are deeply apprehensive about fighting a war on two fronts. They have warned that resources will be at their tightest stretch in maintaining such commitment in both countries.
The demands on British troops in both countries led to criticism from Sir Menzies Campbell, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. He said: "The competing demands of Afghanistan and Iraq have undoubtedly placed a great burden on our armed forces. Sooner or later something has got to give. Only professionalism and commitment have enabled us to meet our obligations."
Meanwhile, relatives of British troops killed in Iraq, who have been asking in vain to meet the Prime Minister, have been invited to attend a reception at the Gloucestershire home of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.
Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon died two years ago, and Reg Keys, whose son Thomas died in 2003, have received letters inviting them to Highgrove on 29 June. Mrs Gentle said: "It is a disgrace that Prince Charles will meet us, but the Prime Minister will not.We have been trying to meet Tony Blair for years."
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