News (page 3)

• A black car with three young men in it did not stop in time and a soldier fired several shots from his machine gun into its engine.
• The driver and his friends were not hit, but many Iraqis do not survive casual encounters with US soldiers.
• It is very easy to be accidentally killed in Iraq.

It was obvious to many American officers from an early stage in the conflict that the Pentagon's claim that it did not count civilian casualties was seen by many Iraqis as proof that the US did not care about how many of them were killed.

The failure to take Iraqi civilian dead into account was particularly foolish in a culture where relatives of the slain are obligated by custom to seek revenge.

• But, If they are right they have saved their lives
• and
• if they are wrong they face no penalty. Remember Abu Ghraib? The goons under the lunatic Donald Rumsfeld have "cleared" all officers of Abu Ghraib from wrong-doing in a white-wash of a report.

Smoke rises above the scene of dual explosions Thursday near an Iraqi police headquarters in Baghdad. (Muhannad Fala'ah / Getty Images.)

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two car bombs ripped through a crowded street Thursday in front of an Interior Ministry office in central Baghdad, killing 18 people and wounding some three dozen others. The death toll from Thursday’s twin car bombs was the highest from an explosion since March 10, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shiite mosque during a funeral. The force of the attack threw people to the ground, and thick, black smoke billowed over the city.

• Abdullah Hussein Zamel was cleaning tables at a local restaurant near the heavily fortified Green Zone (The Green Zone is where the Occupying American Forces have established their bases) when the blast shattered the windows. “I went outside and saw dead and injured people,” he said. “After that, I heard police open heavy fire on a second car.”
• Interior Ministry official, Capt. Ahmed Ismael, said the first two blasts killed 18 and wounded 36. One government worker said five garbage collectors he was supervising were among the dead.

• Militant group Ansar al-Sunnah claimed responsibility for a recent attack, saying in an Internet posting that its “knights of Islam” attacked “renegade policemen doing their morning training.” Ansar al-Sunnah also said it had teamed up with Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq for an attack earlier this week in Kirkuk — an unusual mention of cooperation among Iraq’s disparate and sometimes competing militant groups.

1. On Tuesday, the group said it was responsible for bloody clashes with U.S. soldiers in the Syrian border town of Qaim, and on Wednesday it claimed an attack on a U.S. convoy that killed five Iraqis and injured four U.S. contract workers on Baghdad’s infamous airport road. None of the claims could be verified.
2. In Mahawil, 50 miles south of Baghdad, a suicide bomber blew himself up near an Iraqi police checkpoint, killing four policemen and wounding six others, the Polish-led military force said in a statement.
3. There were other bloody battles Thursday across the country, mostly targeting Iraqi security forces being groomed to eventually take over form U.S. troops.
4. Seven gunmen riding in two vehicles fired on the police station just south of Kirkuk shortly after dawn, killing five police officers and one civilian, police Brig. Sarhat Qadir said.

Al-Jazeera broadcast a video Wednesday showing an American, identified by the U.S. Embassy as Jeffrey Ake, a contractor taken hostage in Baghdad.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Al-Jazeera television broadcast a video Wednesday showing an American who had been kidnapped two days before. The U.S. Embassy said the man on the video appeared to be Jeffrey Ake, a contract worker who was kidnapped Monday while working on a water treatment plant near Baghdad.

Al-Jazeera didn't broadcast the tape's audio, but said the hostage asked the U.S. government to start a dialogue with the Iraqi resistance. It also said the man asked the U.S. government to begin withdrawing from Iraq and to save his life.

The tape showed a man sitting behind a wooden desk as three men pointed their guns toward him. He was holding what looked like a passport and a photo that appeared to show his wife and their three children.

Ake’s family and his company inthe US were following the FBI’s advice in not commenting, police Chief David Gariepy told reporters after meeting with the family.

More than 200 foreigners have been taken captive in Iraq in the past year, and more than 30 have been killed.

Iraqi resistance has not died out as Bush and the Neocons promised. American President George Bush invaded Iraq on cooked up premises and lies. No one in the Bush administration has been punished for the killing and slaughter they conducted and are conducting in Iraq. In fact the American electorate rewarded the spectacle of blood created by George Bush by re-electing him.

What were the reasons for this Britisher to have fallen in line on Tony Blair's quest for blood and Glory with Texan George Bush in the holy land of Iraq?

The Iraq war amounted to a "crime of aggression", the former deputy legal adviser to the United Kingdom Foreign Office, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, has said. In her resignation letter,

A company that was based near As Suwayrah left Iraq and is expected to return to Ukraine by Tuesday, the Defence Ministry said.

Ukraine strongly opposed the US-led war, but later agreed to send a large contingent to serve under Polish command in central and southern Iraq. The move was widely seen as an effort by former President Leonid Kuchma to repair relations with Washington, frayed by allegations that he had approved the sale of radar systems and other military equipment to Saddam Hussein's regime in violation of UN sanctions.

Osama tells Zarqawi to expand the successful rebellion against the American Occupation in occupied holy land of Iraq, to the George Bush targets outside Iraq.

WASHINGTON - The United States has intercepted a message believed to be from fugitive al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, instructing the leader of the Iraqi insurgency to expand his operations and begin attacking U.S. targets outside Iraq, intelligence officials told NBC News on Monday.

Al-Zarqawi, the Emir of al Qaeda in Iraq, is a leading figure among Islamic insurgents who are waging a deadly campaign against U.S.-led Occupation forces in Iraq. The original explanations by the George Bush administration for invading Iraq have proven to be fabrications and lies. The US occupiers and occupation forces in Iraq are intensly hated for obvious reasons, and are now the rallying point for all Islamic forces world-wide.

US Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse confirmed Monday that the department had sent out a classified intelligence bulletin to state homeland security advisers over the weekend to give details of “recent credible but nonspecific” threat information. “This nonspecific information reiterates al-Qaida’s desire to potentially target the homeland,” Roehrkasse said.

• He also said that there was hesitation to recognise the seriousness of the problem and sought to question the attitude of the then army chief. "The fact is there was a degree of hesitancy within the system. Apparently, there was inadequate information and some hesitancy to recognise that there was a serious problem," the then chief of Western Air Command said.
• Asked whether the absence of the chief of defence staff had in any way affected India's reaction, he said it could be no excuse for being indecisive. "But is the absence of a CDS an excuse for inefficiency?" he asked. "As far as Gen Malik is concerned, did he elect to stay back (in Poland) even after being told that the situation in Kargil was serious?" Vinod Patney said.

• "Are we having success rolling up some of the top-tier leaders? Not at this time," said Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas, the highest-ranking Army intelligence officer in Iraq. "But we're successfully working the second- and third-tier leaders to put pressure on the top tier."
• The operations by the Occupation forces killed several thousand suspected insurgents, and swelled the number of detainees to more than 8,000, according to U.S. figures. This is the score of the "football" match.

Further, after a lull in the days after the Jan. 30 election, insurgents have resumed bombings, suicide attacks and assassinations, an increasing share of them directed against Iraqi civilians and security forces.

• There are now an average of about 60 attacks each day, close to the rate before the election, according to U.S. military tallies, and most remain concentrated in Sunni Muslim-populated provinces of central and northwestern Iraq.