http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/26-15

by Conn Hallinan

Sudan: The two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northern desert. Within minutes, the column of vehicles was a string of shattered wrecks burning fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers returned to finish the job.

Syria: Four Blackhawk helicopters skimmed across the Iraqi border, landing at a small farmhouse near the town of al-Sukkariyeh. Black-clad soldiers poured from the choppers, laying down a withering hail of automatic weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, eight Syrians lay dead on the ground. Four others, cuffed and blindfolded, were dragged to the helicopters, which vanished back into Iraq.

Pakistan: a group of villagers were sipping tea in a courtyard when the world exploded. The Hellfire missiles seemed to come out of nowhere, scattering pieces of their victims across the village and demolishing several houses. Between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took place. They killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda members along with 687 civilians.

In each of the above incidents, no country took responsibility or claimed credit. There were no sharp exchanges of diplomatic notes before the attacks, just sudden death and mayhem.

War without Declaration
The F-16s were Israeli, their target an alleged shipment of arms headed for the Gaza Strip. The Blackhawk soldiers were likely from Task Force 88, an ultra-secret U.S. Special Forces group. The Pakistanis were victims of a Predator drone directed from an airbase in southern Nevada.

Please ... what effin' madness!

:puke:

They used anthropologists or other socially tuned in experts to identify the leaders of independent institutions or groups who oppose American invasion and occupation and then they murdered them. Most of these people were civilian professionals. As noncombatants their murders are war crimes. Of course another aspect of this policy is to deliberately kill journalists and destroy independent media resources in a war zone. Another is to destroy hospitals as essential institutions of maintaining a society. A hospital is an anthropological target. It is also a source of information on civilian casualties and the types of weapons being used by the attackers. It is a violation of the international law of armed conflict to attack hospitals.

You forgot the educated class of professionals that have virtually disappeared from Iraq -- either through death squads, exile or scooped by western nations. Iraq, because of the sanctions, had one of the highest per capita of professional PHDs anywhere in the world. That, too would have been a threat.

It is kinda hard in hindsight, to see the American good intentions in any of this -- They claimed they were going into Iraq to correct a tyrannical regime...what they DID, quite obviously, was dismantle a secular society to replace it with a largely backward religious society...ergo the disappearance of the Iraqi woman from public life (estimated that 70% no longer get schooling, whereas under Saddam, public education was mandatory over the expressed wishes of the mullahs that now have found favour with the US) and the disappearance of higher education.

Israeli Commandoes In Iraq To Assassinate 500 Scientists

JERSUALEM, April 18 (IOl & News Agencies) - Some 150 Israeli commandoes are currently inside Iraq on a mission to assassinate 500 Iraqi scientists, a retired French general told the French TV Channel 5 on Friday, April 18.

He asserted that Israel was seeking to liquidate 500 Iraqi armament scientists who were involved in the country’s biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, reported the Israeli Maariv newspaper which carried the news.

The French general, who was not identified, said the scientists hunted by Israel are the same ones who were listed by U.N. weapons inspectors for interviews during their mandate in Iraq which was terminated two days before the unleashing of the U.S.-led war on March 20.

The Israeli commandoes might be operating within the ranks of the American Marines now occupying Iraq, said the French general, without elaborating on how they managed to sneak into the war-ravaged country.

Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, spokesman of the U.S. Central Command war headquarters in As-Sayliya, Qatar, had repeatedly said the U.S.-led war was seeking, beside toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, to eliminate the country’s capabilities in developing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

Appealing to the world community to protect them from the U.S. aggression aimed at obliterating Iraq’s minds, a number of Iraqi scientists and university professors had sent an SOS e-mail complaining American occupation forces were threatening their lives.

In their e-mail, a copy of which was sent to IslamOnlin.net Friday, April 11, they asserted that occupation troops demanded them, particularly physicists, chemists and mathematicians, to hand over all documents and researches in their possession.

American forces had, in this respect, gate-crashed the house of Iraqi scientist Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, dubbed “Mrs Anthrax” by the Americans.

Mrs. Ammash's picture and name were listed by the U.S. Central Command as one of 55 “most-wanted” Iraqis.

[link:www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3006.htm|ICH]
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3006.htm
(the embedded link's code comes up wrong when it's ICH's IP address for some reason on this site)

Iraqi Academics Assassinated During the US-Led Occupation

Pakistan Daily has published the list of Iraqi academics assassinated by US and allied occupation forces. The objective of these targeted assassinations is to "kill a nation", the destroy Iraq's ability to educate its people, to undermine its research and scientific capabilities in literally all fields of endeavor, to transform a nation into a territory, and ultmately to destroy civilization.

Of particular significance is the assassination of prominent scientists and physicians, professors of medicine in the country's leading academic institutions, its social scientists and historians, its physical scientists, its biologists, its engineers.

we are dealing with a carefully devised covert operation. The plan to kill the nation's scientists and intellectuals emanates from US intelligence and the military. It is a deliberate process.

Is the new Obama administration going to turn a blind eye to this diabolical and criminal agenda?

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 27 November 2008
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21343.htm

At the link is a long list of those assassinated, their areas of expertise and the universities they taught at...compiled by Pakistan's news services.

Well, it's effin' madness, as I said above.

:cry:

I've heard the Israeli government cry, "We only do these things in self-defense." B.S. It's not anything of the kind.