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February 15 Demonstration in London: More than a
Million People
CALL FOR BLAIR TO RESIGN
[From our representative Shaikh Mohommed, London,
England.]
It turned out to be a memorable day. 15 February
2003.
My family and I participated in the march and
rally. Because of my health, I
went straight to Hyde Park to listen to
speeches. My son and daughter
participated in the march organized by Stop the
War Coalition, CND and
British Association of Muslims.
Estimates of the number of marchers ranged from
750,000 to two million, with
"more than a million" being the most widely
accepted figure. (Daily Mirror 17
February 2003.)
Here I must give credit to the tabloid paper The
Daily Mirror of London which
has been and is waging incessant campaign again
Bush
and Tony Blair to stop
the War against Iraq. U.K has two tabloids which
mould the opinion of the
masses – one is the Sun and the other is the
Mirror.
The Mirror has come out openly against the
hypocrisy of Bush and Tony
Blair. It also waged campaign against the war on
Afghanistan.
Amongst the speakers at Hyde Park were Tony Benn
(MP), George Galloway,
Harold Pinter, Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London)
and many other prominent
politicians and campaigners including Jesse
Jackson. The
Palestinian
issue was
also raised by the speakers as well as mentioned
in the placards.
The most telling speech was that of Harold Pinter
who claimed
US
barbarism
would destroy the world and called on Tony Blair
to resign. To cheers, he
said: "It is a country run by a bunch of
criminals with Tony Blair as a hired
Christian thug."
London Mayor Ken Livingstone said: "Let everyone
recognize what has happened
here today, that "Britain does not support this
war for oil." The British
people will not tolerate being used to prop up
the most corrupt and
racist
American administration in more than 80 years."
(Daily Mirror 2003,17)
"We now have to wait and see whether the Western
Governments of the West
listen to their own people or not. It would be a
sad day for democracy if
Iraq is attacked despite such a clear
disapproval from the masses."
----------------------------------------------
HALABJA: IS THERE EVIDENCE AGAINST SADDAM?
[In response to our article on the demonization
of President Hussain.]
[Our correspondent, Dr. Edward Miller, has sent
the following note from Ms.
Diane Johnstone with an article from Prof.
Stephen Pelletiere which we quote
very briefly. He was Senior Analyst for the
CIA
at the time of the incident.]
It has been almost universally taken for granted
by all of us that Iraq
gassed its own Kurdish citizens in Halabja
in 1988. The accusation that Saddam thereby
committed "genocide" against
his own people has of course become part of the
Bush administration's
standard war propaganda. But the same accusation
is repeated by opponents
of the war as a way of demostrating that there
anti-war sentiment does not
imply sympathy for the regime of Saddam Hussein.
But what if the accusation is not true?
The articles below provide
quite plausible arguments that the Halabja
killings were (1) not genocide,
and (2) were not even committed by the Iraqis,
but by the Iranians. They
were an accidental by-product of the Iran-Iraq
war, what the U.S. calls
"collatoral damage".
THE GOOD NEWS: deliberate "genocide" may
turn out to be far less
frequent than believed.
THE BAD NEWS: war produces much more
"collatoral damage" in terms
of inadvertent massacres than admitted by those
who advocate war as the
perfect way to solve problems.
************************************************
(From Stephen Pelletiere)
Immediately after the battle, the United
States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated
and produced a classified
report, which it circulated within the
intelligence community on a
need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it
was Iranian gas that killed
the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used
gas against the other in
the battle around Halabja. The condition of the
dead Kurds' bodies,
however, indicated they had been killed with a
blood agent — that is, a
cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use.
The Iraqis, who are
thought to have used mustard gas in the battle,
are not known to have
possessed blood agents at the time."
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2003-02-19 Wed 08:34ct