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03/07/2006:

"Developments in Iraq, March 6"

* MAHMUDIYA - Three people were killed, including two Iraqi soldiers, and five wounded when two car bombs, about 10 minutes apart, one driven by a suicide bomber, detonated in the town of Mahmudiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
One civilian was killed and five people were wounded, including two policemen, when a car bomb went off in Mahmudiya earlier in the day, police said.
* BAGHDAD - Mubdir al-Dulaimi, a senior Iraqi Army official, was assassinated while travelling in his convoy in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital, police said.
BAGHDAD - Three policemen were killed and one was wounded when a car bomb went off near their patrol in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Three civilians were wounded when a car bomb went off in central Baghdad, police said. The target was not known.
BAGHDAD - Ali Hussein al-Khafaji, the dean of the college of engineering, was abducted by gunmen while going to work in Baghdad, police said.
BAQUBA - A car bomb exploded in a busy market in Baquba northeast of Baghdad on Monday, killing six people, including two girls under four, and wounding 23, police said, adding most of the casualties were children.
BAGHDAD - One civilian was killed and 10 were wounded when a car bomb went off in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - One civilian was wounded when four mortar rounds landed in Sadr city in eastern Baghdad, police said.
ANBAR PROVINCE - A U.S. soldier was killed by "enemy action" on Sunday in western Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD - Two civilians and two policemen were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a bank in Baghdad's Doura district, police said.
BAGHDAD - Two policemen and four civilians were wounded when a car bomb exploded as their patrol passed by in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAQUBA - Three civilians were killed by gunmen in separate attacks in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
alertnet.org


Expert on Iraq: 'We're In a Civil War'
"We're in a civil war now; it's just that not everybody's joined in," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.

"It's our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq," added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, "If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they'd say we've been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004."

What a stupid semantics game. When 'we' finally decide that this is indeed a civil war, what then? What's different for people on the ground?


Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals assassinated by death squads
Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals have been assassinated since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a petition to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Summary Executions from the European peace group BRussells [sic] Tribunal on Iraq.

The petition has been signed by Nobel Prize winners Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, José Saramago, and Dario Fo, as well as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Cornel West, and Tony Benn. A Green party member of the European Parliament from Britain, Caroline Lucas, has called for support for the investigation.

The exact figure of deaths is unknown; estimates range from about 300 to more than 1,000. According to Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana, writing in the Guardian last month, Baghdad universities alone have lost 80 members of their staffs. These figures do not include those who have survived assassination attempts.


'14,000 detained without trial in Iraq'
US and UK forces in Iraq have detained thousands of people without charge or trial for long periods and there is growing evidence of Iraqi security forces torturing detainees, Amnesty International said today.
In a new report published today, the human rights group criticised the US-led multinational force for interning some 14,000 people.

Around 3,800 people have been held for over a year, while another 200 have been detained for more than two years, the report - Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq - said.

"It is a dangerous precedent for the world that the US and UK think it completely defensible to hold thousands of people without charge or trial," Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin said.

The detainee situation in Iraq was comparable to Guantánamo Bay, he added, but on a much larger scale, and the detentions appeared to be "arbitrary and indefinite".