‘Phantom Fury’ strikes Fallujah

Compiled by Willy Rosencrans

Nov. 10 (AGR) — As US-led coalition forces prepared to launch a massive assault on the rebel stronghold of Fallujah, Iraq’s interim government declared a state of emergency for 60 days on Nov. 7. The state of emergency, equivalent to martial law, would apply throughout Iraq except the Kurdish north, a spokesman for interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said.

The US-led coalition’s attack on Fallujah angered a huge part of the Iraqi population, divided Iraq’s interim government and drew condemnation from the head of the UN before it even began.

“They [Fallujans] are not terrorists, and there has been no proof of foreign fighters in Fallujah,” said Mahmoud Shakir, former commander of the Iraqi police in Baghdad. “In the name of liberty, they must fight.”

Intercepted communications between militant groups have revealed an increasingly sophisticated understanding of politics in Western Europe and America. Key words like “Black Watch,” a Scottish regiment from the UK of which three troops were killed Nov. 5, are now featuring heavily.

“Militants are not stupid,” one source in Washington said. “They are well aware that many in the UK are against the war.”

Fallujah “depersonalized”

Many of Fallujah’s 300,000 inhabitants fled to makeshift camps to the west or sought refuge in Baghdad in the days preceding the attack, code-named Operation Phantom Fury, and US planes dropped leaflets urging those remaining to leave.

Early on Nov. 4 US aircraft fired on barricaded insurgent positions in northeastern and southeastern parts of the city, the military said. Heavy artillery was used later.

After a night of air strikes, US forces blocked roads leading to Fallujah on Nov. 5, including the highway to the border with Jordan and Syria, witnesses said. Syrian officials also said the Iraqis closed a crossing point on the border. Later the military announced by loudspeaker that any male under the age of 45 caught either in or attempting to leave the city would be arrested.

By Nov. 6 the city was completely sealed. A city leader, Sheik Khaled Ham­mud, launched an appeal for emergency aid for some 12,000 people camped in an area called Habba­niyah, to the west of Fallujah.

“We need tents, medical aid, two ambulances, mattresses, food rations, water pumps and drinking water,” he wrote in a letter to the Committee of Muslim Scholars, an influential religious group.

Air strikes reduced the Nazzal hospital, run by a Saudi Arabian Islamic charity, to rubble. Hospital officials say all the contents were ruined. Witnesses said that only the facade remained. A nearby medical supplies storeroom and dozens of houses were damaged.

On Nov. 7 an indefinite curfew was enforced from dusk and all weapons were banned. In military jargon, the city had been “depersonalized” and districts were given US names like “Queens” to replace their Iraqi names.

By this time at least 200,000 people were thought to have left. Abu Mohammad al-Shamari, an unemployed computer engineer, was at an office of the Iraqi Islamic party, a Sunni political group, in Baghdad. The party has found housing for fleeing families and is providing them with food and money.

“When you go to Fallujah… you see destruction everywhere,” said al-Shamari. He left the city on Nov. 5 with his wife and two-year-old son. “We know the Americans are a major power and that the Iraqi government has no will, they just receive instructions. Yet they will not control Fallujah.”

Hudaifa al-Ani, a lecturer at Baghdad University, said the streets were deserted.

“Fallujah is dead after 4pm, you cannot see anyone around,” he said. “Sometimes you see a man by himself staying to protect his house or his shop from being looted. Before it was a prosperous crowded city, now it is completely destroyed.”

The official attack began on Nov. 8 with the capture of the city’s hospital, which was regarded as an important strategic target.

Although Fallujah general hospital, a small, poorly-equipped facility on the western outskirts of the city, should have been protected under the Geneva conventions, it was deemed legitimate by US commanders because they said it had been taken over by insurgents.

The Euphrates river runs through the western edge of Fallujah, cutting off the hospital from the city. US marines also seized two bridges near the hospital, in an effort to establish the river as a natural barrier on the western flank.

One unnamed senior American officer claimed that the hospital had become a “center of propaganda,” reflecting the military’s frustration at the high death tolls doctors frequently announce after American bombing raids.

AC-130 Specter gunships raked the city with cannon fire and machine guns. Inside the city, masked guerrillas roamed empty streets. Reuters Television footage showed men weeping as they buried seven white-shrouded bodies, some of them fighters, in a narrow trench in a former soccer stadium.

Fighting raged on through Nov. 9. Residents said a US airstrike destroyed a clinic that had been receiving casualties after the seizure of Fallujah’s main hospital.

“There is not a single surgeon in Fallujah,” said Sami al-Jumaili, a doctor at the hospital who escaped arrest when it was taken by US troops. “There are scores of injured civilians in their homes whom we can’t move. A 13-year-old child just died in my hands.”

The Nov. 9 strike left no clinics open and no way to count casualties.

By Nov. 10, amid continuing fighting, the US military declared that it had taken 70 percent of the city and began handing control of the Jolan district over to Iraqi forces. Resistance was described as having been lighter than expected. Possible explanations included the chance that many of the insurgents left before the operation started.

Resistance mounts across Iraq

Clashes were reported across the country all week long. On Nov. 4 the international medical aid group Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) became the latest of many such organizations to pull out of Iraq, citing the “extreme risks” run by humanitarian workers in the country.

Insurgents killed a senior oil ministry official on Nov. 3, videos of the beheadings of three Iraqi national guardsmen and an Iraqi army officer were released, and gunmen kidnapped another US contractor from his home in Baghdad.

The following day an Iraqi National Guard patrol was hit by a car bomb in Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, Iraqi hospital officials said. A suicide car bomber drove his explosive-laden vehicle into the city government offices in Dujail, 46 miles north of the capital.

On Nov. 6, attacks on a police station in Samarra killed 37 people, most of them members of Iraqi security forces.

On Nov. 7, at dawn in Haditha, militants attacked a police station; after a 90-minute firefight 21 officers were led away at gunpoint and shot dead in the street outside. At a police station in Haqlaniyah, gunmen killed Shaher al-Jughaifi, the Iraqi interim government’s head of security for western Iraq.

On Nov. 9, hundreds of armed men entered Ramadi, taking over government buildings, while in Baquba, north of Baghdad, 45 people, including 25 policemen were killed in a series of attacks. An attack on a National Guard headquarters in Kirkuk killed three people.

Also on Nov. 9. the Fallujah offensive touched off political turmoil as the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country’s most influential Sunni political group, announced its withdrawal from the government.

The Association of Muslim Scholars, which claims to represent more than 3,000 of Iraq’s Sunni mosques, called for Iraqis to boycott elections described as being held “over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah and the blood of the wounded.”

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Aljazeera, Associated Press, BBC, Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Knight-Ridder, LA Times, Observer (UK), Reuters

Surge of violence engulfs Ivory Coast

Compiled by Greg White

Nov. 10 (AGR) — Violence erupted across the west African country of Ivory Coast, killing scores of civilians and wounding hundreds.

The crisis began Nov. 4 after Ivorian aircraft bombed rebel-held towns in the north, ending an 18-month cease-fire policed by 10,000 French and UN peacekeepers.

Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo called the air strikes on Korhogo and Bouake an operation “to liberate and reunify the country” divided between the rebel-held north and the government-controlled south.

On Nov. 6, nine French soldiers were killed and 22 were wounded when government jets bombed a French base in Bouake. An American aid worker was killed in the air strikes as well.

Ivorian officials initially maintained they had no evidence their planes had bombed the French camp in the rebel-held town, but later acknowledged responsibility. The officials said they had not meant to target the French.

The French military immediately retaliated by destroying most of the Ivorian air force, blowing up two Ivorian Sukhoi 25 fighters and five helicopters in the southern city of Abidjan and the capital Yamoussoukro.

The punishing French response set off three days of violent rampages by angry government loyalists, with mobs of thousands confronting French peacekeepers, looting and burning, and roaming house to house with machetes in search of foreigners.

Pro-government youth mobs, known as Young Patriots, ran through the suburbs of the commercial capital, Abidjan, chanting anti-French slogans and attacking businesses and schools with links to France. Ivorian government figures encouraged the violence, broadcasting appeals for the Young Patriots to rise up and “liberate” the country from its former colonial ruler. The president later called for calm in a televised address on Nov. 7.

French property in the Bietry and Cocody districts, including four schools and a library, were looted and the French-controlled airport came under attack.

French armored vehicles moved into some residential neighborhoods, scattering rioters with volleys of tear gas. Helicopters fired percussion grenades to break up mobs holding the bridges and besieging the French military base.

On Nov. 8, hundreds of demonstrators faced off with French troops in Abidjan after state radio urged protesters to form a human shield to protect the house of President Gbagbo. French armored vehicles moved in around Gbagbo’s home -- heightening supporters’ suspicions of a move against the man French leaders say they hold personally responsible for the bombing of their forces.

Many protestors chanted “The whites don’t like the blacks, but we don’t care!” Some signs declared, “Ivory Coast is a sovereign state.”

French forces fired warning shots, witnesses and protesters said, while others claimed they were fired at directly. Doctors said many of those treated had been trampled in the rush to get away, although they reported removing bullets from several wounded.

One of the injured in Abidjan’s Cocody hospital, Claude Akoun, said he and other demonstrators were shot by French soldiers near Gbagbo’s residence, after they walked toward the troops, insulting them.

At least seven people were killed, hospital sources said. French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie denied that troops had fired on civilians, discounting accusations by senior Gbagbo adviser Alain Toussaint that 50 civilians have died in “massacres” by French troops.

“We have counted around 50 people dead, all of them were demonstrators shot by the French,” National Reconciliation Minister Sebastien Dano told Reuters, adding the death toll was for both the main city Abidjan and other towns.

There was no independent confirmation of the figure but sources at one hospital in Abidjan said 18 people had been taken there dead or had died of their wounds later.

Antoine Foucher, head of mission in Ivory Coast for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), told Reuters that about 700 people had been injured in Abidjan during the riots. He stressed the figure was provisional and still needed to be confirmed.

An exodus from Ivory Coast began Nov. 10 with a planeload of French nationals flying back to France, while thousands of Ivorians fled to escape the week of deadly violence, amid new tensions that sent thousands into Abidjan’s streets.

Belgium, Canada, Italy, Germany and Spain will also evacuate nationals, while Russia and the United States have yet to announce plans to do the same.

Nearly 2,000 foreign nationals were sheltering in French and United Nations bases in Abidjan, many plucked to safety by French helicopters as machete-wielding mobs looted their homes.

About 14,000 French citizens live in Ivory Coast, many of whom hid in their homes. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from neighboring Muslim nations also went into hiding.

Francesca Fontanini, spokeswoman of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, told AFP that “at least” 5,000 Ivorians have arrived in Liberia’s northeastern Nimba County, after government forces started bombarding key rebel positions in the north.

UNHCR has warned of a crisis should the situation continue to deteriorate in Ivory Coast, once a beacon of stability for troubled west Africa but now a flashpoint for unrest that could disrupt the fragile peace settling over its neighbors after decades of war.

By Nov. 10, the week-long violence in Ivory Coast shut down cocoa exports from the world’s largest producer, closing ports that ship more than 40 percent of the world’s raw material for chocolate.

This comes at the peak of Ivory Coast’s main harvest, with overall production last year of 1.4 million tons. Ivory Coast normally produces 80 percent of its cocoa between October and January. Cocoa production is centered in the southwest, the base of Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo’s ethnic group and in recent years scene of some of the worst political violence.

“Cocoa production cannot move because the roads are blocked by militants or the French army, which is effectively shutting down the entire country,” a trader told AFP in London.

In Paris, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier denied his country’s growing intervention was aimed at destabilizing Ivory Coast.

“In no way is France there to destabilize the Ivory Coast and its institutions or take sides. Its aim above all is to preserve constitutional legality.” The French minister added that there was “no hidden agenda.”

Ivory Coast will ask the UN Security Council for action against France, presidential spokesman Desire Tagro said. “We are faced with aggression by one country against another country. We are going to inform the entire world ... that France has come to attack us.”

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, BBC, Guardian, Independent (UK), Reuters

Growing evidence of election fraud

Compiled by Bob Strott

Nov. 10 (AGR) — In election news, more questions are being raised about the accuracy of electronic voting machines used last week. Three Democratic members of Congress have written to the General Accounting Office to request an investigation into problems with voting machines on Election Day. The Congressmen are John Conyers of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida. In their letter they note how in Franklin County, Ohio, the electronic voting systems mistakenly gave President Bush an extra 3,900 votes in a precinct where only 638 total votes had been cast. Also they noted that in North Carolina, electronic voting machines accidentally lost 4,500 votes.

Bush won the state of Ohio by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results. And Kerry conceded the election on Nov. 3, after saying that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result.

But Kerry conceded before troubling election irregularities began surfacing in Ohio. Investigative reporter Greg Palast has pointed out that there are more than 92,000 “spoiled” ballots in Ohio, mostly in Democratic wards, that could easily be hand counted, 155,000 uncounted provisional ballots, uncounted overseas military ballots and some uncounted absentee ballots.

Despite the comments of Kerry’s running mate, Senator John Edwards, that every vote would be counted, Kerry’s concession makes that promise unlikely. In Ohio, an estimated 14.6 percent of the votes are cast on e-voting machines, known for their glitches and susceptibility to hacking and fraudulent manipulation. Just this year, four Ohio counties purchased voting machines from the notoriously partisan Diebold corporation, whose CEO, Columbus resident and Bush fundraiser Wally O’Dell, pledged to help “Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President.”

Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County, Ohio, Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch that on one of three machines in one of his precincts, a malfunction occurred when its cartridge was plugged into a reader and generated a faulty number. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board’s Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

The Dispatch also confirmed a Columbus Free Press story, posted on Election Day, involving far fewer voting machines in predominantly black Democratic inner-city voting wards. On page one, under the misleading headline, “Suburbs were busiest even with more machines,” the Dispatch reports that: “As seasoned voters in many of Columbus’ predominantly black neighborhoods waited in long lines Tuesday, they quickly recognized that the crush of new voters wasn’t the sole cause of congestion. There also were fewer voting machines.” In one precinct, the Free Press reported 12 voters leaving due to work or because they were handicapped or elderly.

One Republican Central Committee member told the Free Press that Damschroder held back up to 2000 machines and dispersed many of the other machines to affluent suburbs in Franklin County.

The growing election irregularities suggest that John Kerry conceded too soon, and that spoiled ballots, provisional ballots, e-voting glitches and partisan manipulation by Republican election officials deprived the Senator of the victory projected in Zogby and CNN exit polls.

Voting rights activists from Citizen’s Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE-OH) have already begun to claim that the voting places with e-voting machines were sites that did not match scientific exit poll data.

Damschroder told the Dispatch that the voting machine glitches were “why the results on election night are unofficial.”

Damschroder is the former Executive Director of the Franklin County Republican Party, and sources close to the Board of Elections have said that Damschroder and Ohio’s Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell met with President Bush in Columbus on Election Day.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called “spoilage.” Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded.

Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded.

And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts.

This closely mirrors what occured in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn’t match the official count. That’s because then Secretary of State of Florida, Republican Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn’t punched through completely — leaving a “hanging chad” — or was punched extra times. Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by African Americans.

Ohio is one of the last states in the US to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year’s Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Harris’ efforts landed her a seat in Congress. In response to inquiries as to how many votes were lost to spoilage this time, Blackwell’s office, won’t say, though the law requires it be reported.

But it is known that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss — that’s 110,000 votes — overwhelmingly Democratic.

There were also the “challenges.” That’s a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio’s use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws — almost never used — allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting “provisional” ballots - which may or may not be counted.

Blackwell estimates there were 175,000 provisional ballots; Democrats say 250,000. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts that those provisional ballots resulting from challenges were, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards, and the totals begin to match the exit polls. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

After a pre-election mission to the United States in September, an arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe, invited by the Bush administration to witness the vote, noted ‘”concerns expressed with regard to the right to vote, and the possibility that this right may not be evenly applied or protected throughout the country.’’ Among the issues raised by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights were the growing use of electronic voting machines, many of which do not allow for a manual audit and recount, and inconsistencies in the workings of a new “provisional ballot’’’ designed for people whose names are not on a voters list.

Sources: AP, Columbus Dispatch, Columbus Free Press, CommonDreams.org, Democracy Now, IPS, The Observer (UK), tompaine.com