Iraq Govt Announces Emergency Powers Law

[cthrumatrix]

Iraq Govt Announces Emergency Powers Law


By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer

snip

Justice Minister Malik Dohan al-Hassan said the premier would need to get warrants from an Iraqi court for each step and said martial law could only be declared for 60 days or for the duration of the specific violence, whichever is shorter.


"We realize this law might restrict some liberties, but there are a number of guarantees," al-Hassan said. "We have tried to guarantee justice and also to guarantee human rights."


The law was needed to combat the insurgents who are "preventing government employees from attending their jobs, preventing foreign workers from entering the country to help rebuild Iraq (news - web sites) and in general trying to derail general elections," he said.


Human Rights Minister Bakhityar Amin compared the law to the U.S. Patriot Act.

snip
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=1&u=/ap/20040707/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq

ashcroft must be jumping for joy....Patriot Act in another country

[achtung_circus]

1. Watch for the emergence

of another Iraqi strong man and the legal justification for his actions.

[rooboy]

3. But who will support him if not the US?

this will be big, big trouble...

[Jim Warren]

2. martial law

is just a way of getting people who have no experience with democracy to accept it.

<sarcasm off>

[Tellurian]

8. Bush's 20,000 Mercenaries read private Army, dress rehearsal for the US

Yup, I can feel it in my Bones...

Kerry had better pay attention here..

we are in some serious trouble.

Bush is escalating his plans.

I hope Dem's aren't caught lingering behind the curve!

[dbt]

4. IIRC, CBS reported 7/6 that the death penalty would be reinstated

as part of these Emergency Powers. Very telling if true. Very convenient if, for example, a colonial power wanted to quickly silence a former dictator who might have some, er, embarrassing things to say about his former cronies.

:evilgrin:
dbt

[theHandpuppet]

5. Welcome to the new sovereign, democratic Iraq!

Run by American puppets they didn't elect and enforced by martial law.

Ain't freedom grand!

[Briar]

6. This is why we had the pantomime of the "handover"

It would be bad publicity for the Coalition to impose martial law. A so-called Iraqi government however, packed with willing Quislings, could do so and leave Bush's hands superficially clean.

I notice Allawi has done nothing to stop the continued war crime of bombing residential areas. This development therefore comes as no surprise.

[seemslikeadream]

7. from other thread

ewagner (1000+ posts) Wed Jul-07-04 10:06 AM
Response to Original message

1. Didn't we all expect this?

Dubya's only real choice for Iraq was (and remains) a kinder, gentler, Saddam.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.


tom_paine (1000+ posts) Wed Jul-07-04 10:14 AM
Response to Reply #1

3. And Ambassador Death Squad, our own Eichmann

Edited on Wed Jul-07-04 10:15 AM by tom_paine
is there to implement the plan.



Imperial Amerikan Eichmann -- Ambassador of Death Squads John Negroponte



The original Eichmann -- Hitler's John Negroponte

John Wilkes Booth-- The First Freeper; Thomas Jefferson--The First DUer; Frederick Douglass--DUer: Honorable Mention; Ernst Roehm, who lead the Freikorps (German Freepers) of Germany to many victories and Freeps of Communists and Jews


seemslikeadream (1000+ posts) Wed Jul-07-04 11:25 AM
Response to Reply #3

6. Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq

Just one more time. Why?

Iraqi ambassador pick grilled on hand-over

By Steven Weisman
The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's nominee for ambassador to Iraq on Tuesday defended the limits that would be placed on Iraqi self-rule, particularly those on control over security forces, asserting that after June 30 Iraqis will have "a lot more sovereignty than they have right now."
Facing skeptical questions about the new constraints emerging in the long-planned transfer of power before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nominee, John Negroponte, said he saw his major challenge as trying to avert conflicts if the new Iraqi government objected to U.S. military actions. "These are the kinds of questions that I think our diplomacy is going to have to deal with," said Negroponte, who is now ambassador to the United Nations.
The toughest questions came from Democrats, but all the senators said they would support Negroponte's confirmation, which the committee could approve on Thursday. Senate aides said Negroponte could be confirmed by the full Senate as early as next week.
Negroponte said that any decisions on whether to attack rebel strongholds, as the United States is threatening now in Fallujah and Najaf, would require "great political sensitivity" even though American s will nominally be in charge of such decisions.

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Apr ...


Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq

Dems Ignore Negroponte's Death Squad Past, Look to Confirm Iraq Appointmen

As Negroponte, responded to Hagel, he was interrupted by an activist, Andres Conteris of Non-violence International.

Andres Conteris, is program director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the human rights group Non-violence International. He disrupted yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on John Negroponte's appointment as US ambassador to Iraq.

As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

http://www.pacifica.org/progra ...

Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq

Negroponte's "embassy" in Baghdad will, according to press reports, constitute the largest US "embassy staff" in the world with some 3000 employees, including up to 1,000 Americans.

Yet according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun in 1995, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military.

Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.http://www.globalresearch.ca/a ...
In a cruel irony, the Bush administration has appointed a bona fide "terrorist" to wage its "war on terrorism" in Iraq.

It should come as no surprise that "on the day he was appointed to Iraq, Honduras decided to bring its troops in Iraq home." (Financial Times, April 21, 2004)
http://www.conspiracyplanet.co ...


Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors

On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980's." This report was partly declassified on Oct. 22, 1998, in response to demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.

Reich, unlike Negroponte, is primarily a lobbyist and anti-Castro activist rather than a diplomat. He is director of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba and works for some of America's favorite industries: liquor (Bacardi), tobacco (British-American Tobacco), and weapons (Lockheed Martin). He also serves as vice-chairman of the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Program, or WRAP, an apparel industry-backed group characterized by union activists as an artifice for clothing importers to avoid serious scrutiny of their factories in developing countries.

In the 1980s, he headed a propaganda department in the State Department called the Office of Public Diplomacy. This unit, staffed with CIA and Pentagon psychological warfare specialists, reported to Oliver North. The function of the operation was to win support for administration policy in Central America. They wrote op-eds under the name of Nicaraguan rebel leaders and attacked those who differed with Reagan's policies. The Congressional investigation of the Iran-contra scandal identified numerous illegalities which led to the closure of the Office of Public Diplomacy.

Reich followed up these activities by serving as ambassador to Venezuela from 1986-89, at the height of the Iran-contra scandal. The Venezuelan government tried unsuccessfully to block his nomination.

While working for Bacardi, he successfully lobbied to slip Section 211 into the 1998 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, thus stripping Cuba of trademark protection. Ironically, he will be overseeing the Helms-Burton Act, which he helped to draft, which the administration has just decided not to carry into effect.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/a ...

NEGROPONTE - Sleeping Ambassador or Death Squad Diplomat?
The widespread use of American aerial surveillance to direct the Contra murderers to villages where only women and children were present to be killed, the routine use of torture, the encouragement of drug-smuggling into the U.S. to provide funding for the U.S.-backed forces all were revealed only after Negroponte had left his post as U.S. Ambassador to the Honduras. And who could forget the Honduran Anti-communist Liberation Army's ever popular practice of dropping victims from helicopters while they were in flight?

Make no mistake about it -- both Iraqi rebels and Al Qaeda terrorists see Negroponte's appointment as the first stage in implementing a policy of covert violence against their right to sovereignty and will effectively use it to recruit and incite radicals to commit more acts of violence against us. It's no coincidence that our Office of Homeland Security issued a heightened security alert just as Bush announced his plans for Negroponte.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contr ...

US Martyrs Pose Questions for Negroponte
October 28, 2003
By TONI SOLO

US nuns murdered in El Salvador 4

In 1981, a couple of decades before Rachel Corrie was murdered, the bodies of four women were found in a shallow grave in a rural district not far from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. They had been raped and shot dead by members of the Salvadoran army on the orders of senior officers. In the context of the time, the atrocity would hardly have merited reporting. But the women were United States citizens. Two were religious sisters of the New York based Maryknoll order, Ita Ford and Maureen Clarke. One was an Ursuline Sister, Dorothy Kazel, the fourth a lay missioner, Jean Donovan. By virtue of their nationality, the story did make the news, just--the back page of the New York Times, to that paper's eternal shame.

Those four women had helped defend Salvadorans from the terror unleashed against their own people by the Salvadoran government with support from the United States administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They gave their lives working alongside vulnerable people and communities in El Salvador. The murders followed the assassination in 1980 of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. The women's deaths were manipulated by the US government and its ever-pliant news media. The full facts took years to emerge. US ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, falsely accused the women of having supported the Salvadoran armed opposition, the FMLN. In fact, the four women were passionate advocates of non-violence, accompanying the rural villagers they served while caught up in a violent civil war.

Ambassador Kirkpatrick's statements on the case of the four women were to be expected from an unrepentant supporter of the bloodthirsty Argentinian military dictatorship. Her successor at the UN was Vernon Walters, former deputy director of the CIA, co-organiser of the continent wide terrorist blueprint Plan Condor and promoter of Ronald Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua. In 1986 Vernon Walters threw in the face of the UN his government's rejection of the International Court of Justice verdict convicting the US of terrorism against Nicaragua.

Kirkpatrick's and Walters' apologetics for mass murder helped John Negroponte, then US ambassador to Honduras, cover up his support for the systematic forced disappearances used to destroy Honduran civilian opposition to the presence of Contra bases in their country. Thomas Pickering, US ambassador to El Salvador at the time, also gave misleading information on local army and paramilitary murders, probably an essential qualification for his subsequent posting in 1989 as US ambassador to the UN, taking over from Vernon Walters.

Jean Kirkpatrick, Vernon Walters, Thomas Pickering, John Negroponte and other US government representatives sent clear signals that the local military in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were to be allowed a free hand by the United States government to murder tens of thousands of civilians and anyone who spoke out against the slaughter. Perhaps the defining climax to the sickening murder campaign came in 1989 when the Salvadoran army killed six Jesuit academics and two of their domestic staff at the University of Central America in San Salvador. These crimes were made possible because the United States government consistently tried to conceal its institutional role in funding, training and supporting the military and paramilitary perpetrators. The Iran-Contra scandal was the culmination of that sustained program of regional deceit.


http://www.counterpunch.org/so ...

doodlehaus (127 posts) Wed Jul-07-04 10:07 AM
Response to Original message

2. Ah, the dream of democracy in the Middle East.


Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.


nodictators (535 posts) Wed Jul-07-04 10:40 AM
Response to Original message

4. AP: "a long-anticipated package of security laws..." ???


Huh? Weren't we supposedly awaiting Iraq's "democracy" via the elections in Jan. 2005?

CIA stooge Allawi was put in power by BushCo on June 28, 2004. He quickly suggested martial law for Iraq. Can't the AP find any journalists who have a memory span of more than 9 days?

Or, Oops, the AP writer knew this was the plan all along, but the American people were kept in the dark. Uh, "thanks," AP.


lil-petunia (416 posts) Wed Jul-07-04 11:05 AM
Response to Original message

5. oh dear

Edited on Wed Jul-07-04 11:06 AM by lil-petunia
On July 3, didn't the shrub just announce that the country was free, never to return to that kind of stuff, yet three days later, they impose martial law over the country? THis is progress? This is good news?

who do they think they are kidding?


"A democratic Iraq is a blow for terrorism." George W. Bush, April 14, 2004


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SophieZ (10 posts) Wed Jul-07-04 11:59 AM
Response to Reply #5

7. Instead of refining democracy to send to Iraq.....


They're refining martial law, and will send it to us.


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seemslikeadream (1000+ posts) Wed Jul-07-04 12:01 PM
Response to Original message

8. When Saddam Fell: How the Press was Misled From Day One


from monroncrief in GD



From editorandpublisher.com

When Saddam Fell: How the Press was Misled From Day One

They were the shots seen 'round the world: newspaper photographs and TV images of jubilant Iraqis toppling a giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on April 9, 2003, shortly after the U.S. military chased him out of town. Now, after months of rumors, the U.S. military has confirmed that the entire stunt was conceived by the U.S. military and enacted with the help of a fast-thinking Army psychological operation (PSYOP).

A U.S. Army internal study of the war reveals, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, that as the Iraqi regime was collapsing that day, U.S. Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad. It was a Marine colonel who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said, with the PSYOP team making it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi action.

First, the colonel, who was not named in the report, selected the statue as a "target of opportunity." Then the PSYOP team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians, many of them young people, to assemble and assist.

But Marines had already draped an American flag over the statue's face. "God bless them, but we were thinking from PSYOP school that this was just bad news," the PSYOP member wrote in the report. "We didn't want to look like an occupation force." A PSYOP sergeant quickly replaced the American flag with an Iraqi flag.

"Ultimately," the Los Angeles Times report concluded, "a Marine recovery vehicle toppled the statue with a chain, but the effort appeared to be Iraqi-inspired because the PSYOP team had managed to pack the vehicle with cheering Iraqi children."

Photos of the toppling appeared on front pages all over the world with captions that attributed the idea to a happy Iraqi mob.


Walt Starr (1000+ posts) Wed Jul-07-04 12:05 PM
Response to Original message

9. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss


So we traded one dictator for another?

Nice....

Briar (127 posts) Wed Jul-07-04 12:32 PM
Response to Original message

10. This is why we had the "handover"


It would be bad publicity for the Coalition to impose martial law. A so-called Iraqi government however, packed with willing Quislings, could do so and leave Bush's hands superficially clean.

I notice Allawi has done nothing to stop the continued war crime of bombing residential areas. This development therefore comes as no surprise.

[drthais]

9. uh...'emergencypowerslaw?"

up until yesterday
they were calling it correctly
....Martial Law

idiots

lets call a spade a spade here

[stickdog]

10. Thank God the "Iraqis" did this and not us! (nt)

[Tellurian]

11. Stickdog...The Iraqi Martial Law is the dry run for when it happens here..

Bush has his private army, 20,000 mercenaries sequestered in Iraq..

When he declares Martial Law here, how long will it take to get them here?

[stickdog]

12. I can't disagree. That's why its so important to house so many troops

overseas.

We will soon become the "insurgents" who need "pacification."