Cliff Kindy, Christian Peacemaker Teams
www.cliffiraq.blogspot.com

Smoke rises continually from the acres of garbage that fill the river bend in the Green Zone, US occupation headquarters, across the Tigris from our apartment. Apparently, with the security risks of dozens of garbage trucks entering and departing the Green Zone daily, someone decided to dump it all along the river, outside the concrete walls. It must be like the constantly burning “Gehenna” or hell that Jesus mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount (see Matt. 5:29 and 30). My memory is that Gehenna is an image of the valley below Jerusalem where the garbage was dumped and burned.

Here in Iraq it represents the waste that accumulates as the US war against Iraq soon enters month twenty. There are over 1200 dead US soldiers and maybe 20,000 injured. Iraqi civilian deaths are between twenty and one hundred thousand. Injured aren’t counted. Dead Iraqi soldiers and resistance fighters - anyone have any numbers? It was all to remove one man, Sadaam Hussein, from power. The country of Iraq is in shambles and going down. The price of gasoline in the US has increased about one dollar per gallon. The reputation of the US around the world - want to measure that change? The US deficit is incomprehensible. But I hear we are winning.

Dahr Jamail

BAGHDAD, Nov 18 (IPS) - Journalists are increasingly being detained and threatened by the U.S.-installed interim government in Iraq. Media have been stopped particularly from covering recent horrific events in Fallujah.

The “100 Orders” penned by former U.S. administrator in Iraq L. Paul Bremer include Order 65 passed March 20 to establish an Iraqi communications and media commission. This commission has powers to control the media because it has complete control over licensing and regulating telecommunications, broadcasting, information services and all other media establishments.

Gas lines up to 4 miles long plague Baghdad. (Dahr Jamail)

Dahr Jamail

We had our daily car bomb today when a suicide bomber drove his car into a US patrol as it passed near the Yarmouk police station. Several Iraqis were killed, with no report yet on US casualties. I felt the rumble even though I was on a street far away from the blast-at least 5 miles distant.

Walking and driving on the streets Baghdad I find myself in a sea of chaos. Traffic is mayhem for many reasons. The current fuel crisis being the lead cause. Lines at petrol stations stretch for miles at some of the stations. A common scene at these lines is that of people pushing their cars because they are already out of gas or to save what precious little may be left in their tank.

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 16 (IPS) The United States, which has accused the United Nations of condoning bribery and corruption in the now defunct oil-for-food programme in Iraq, has not itself been ethical, says a former senior U.N. official who once headed the humanitarian project in Baghdad.

“Every contract, kickback and every (barrel of oil) smuggled into Turkey, Syria and Jordan, and even into Iran, was well known to and closely monitored by (overhead) U.S. satellites,” says former Assistant Secretary-General Denis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq in 1997-1998.

Besides, he added, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, who was a U.S. and UK ally, made millions of dollars from illegal shipments of oil and gas into Turkey, together with the supplier in Baghdad — (former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s son) Udhay Hussein.

“U.S. oil companies, which indirectly bought some 40 percent of Iraqi oil through the oil-for-food programme, paid the kickbacks (indirectly),” Halliday told IPS.