Monday May 25, 2009, 4:57 pm
How sad. I can remember when my cousin's husband was killed in Viet Nam and all that she had to go through to get his belongings, etc.
Thank you Uhoud.

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 3:59 pm
A Life Lost, a Plan Derailed, A Fiancee Left in Limbo
In the Army, There's No Form to Verify Love

By William Wan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 25, 2009



So much now depends on the ring. For Kyle Harper, there are few other signs remaining of the life she should have had with her fiance. For the longest time, she kept the diamond engagement ring on her finger. It proved what the world at times refused to acknowledge: that she had mattered to Sgt. Michael Hullender.

When Michael was killed on a dusty road in Iraq, Kyle, now 27, got her first inkling from a roommate who told her Michael's parents had called. There was no knock on the door, no official phone call or notification. Later, when she tried to obtain the things he left behind -- an old T-shirt, his dog tags, little mementos from his quarters -- she found herself floating in legal limbo, with no rights to his effects or his name.

Even in a bureaucracy as large as the Army, there is no form you can fill out to verify love, to explain the messy details of life; only the marriage certificate counts. As a result, the military had to treat Kyle the way it does all fiancees -- as though she had no relationship with Michael. All the Army could offer were condolences. There would be no grief counseling, no casualty pay, no say in his burial.

Those rights fell to his next of kin. And even there, after his death, a few in his family sided with the military. After all, they pointed out, they had known Michael his whole life. She had met him only in his last years. Rifts formed. Words were exchanged.

In the end, all she had left was the ring he gave her and what it represented -- his promise and his love. Even now, two years after his death at 29, she wonders what to do with it. Sitting on her couch in Northeast Washington, she holds up the ring to a stranger. Sunlight catches the diamond, and she poses this question: What do you do with a promise that can never be fulfilled?

* * *

The military does not keep statistics on engaged soldiers or their partners. The closest thing is an obscure 2004 survey by a West Point researcher estimating that 25 percent of soldiers in Iraq have "significant others" who are not spouses. The stories behind those numbers vary along with each couple's reasons for not tying the knot. Some simply aren't ready; others don't believe in the institution.

For Michael and Kyle, it was a question of marrying for the right reasons.

They met in Alaska in 2006, while she was waiting tables at a ski bar. She had graduated from Georgetown University, where she was a women's studies major. He was an Army medic who had finished a tour in Afghanistan as a Ranger and was stationed at Fort Richardson.

What attracted her was how he seemed to walk right through the walls she usually put up against the world. By their third date, he was telling her, "You pretend you don't need anyone, but everyone needs someone to take care of them."

For months, they spent almost every weekend together and talked daily by phone. But a deadline loomed over their relationship. Seven months after they met, Michael was deployed to Iraq. A few weeks before he left, while driving her home, he turned to her and said quietly, "What would you do if I asked you to marry me?"

"I'd say no," she blurted out. They would be doing it for the wrong reasons, she insisted. Out of fear something would happen to him in Iraq. Out of fear they would grow apart while he was gone.

Instead, they vowed to write each other almost every day, to draw closer even while separated by the vast divide. Five months later, he returned on leave and asked her again, this time with a diamond ring he bought with hazard pay.

When she said yes, he slipped the ring on her finger and called his family to tell them the news.

* * *

It would be weeks before Kyle talked to Michael's parents again. By then, he had returned to Iraq and resumed his duties in a dangerous southern region known as the Triangle of Death.

Right before he left, they had considered a last-minute wedding. The benefits were huge: almost $2,100 more a month in separation pay and housing, plus health insurance for Kyle. But, again, they decided it would be for the wrong reasons. Once, the issue of wills and life insurance had come up, what would happen if Michael died. But neither wanted to talk about it.

Two months later, on April 28, 2007, a unit near Michael was ambushed. He rushed to help and died when a bomb exploded under his feet.

It was under those circumstances that Kyle met Michael's parents for the first time, flying to Georgia to plan his funeral with them. It was an awkward situation all around. His parents were divorced, but his father, Ren, opened his house near Atlanta to the entire family.

Ren made most of the decisions regarding Michael's burial. Kyle offered to help pick out the gravestone. Ren declined. Kyle insisted on speaking at the service. Ren gave her the okay, hoping it would help her achieve closure.

Ren and Michael's mother, Cindy, asked Army officials to give Kyle one of three folded flags from his burial. And for a while, that was how things stood, everyone too overwhelmed with grief to handle much more. Then the personal effects from Michael's base in Iraq came back.

Ren quickly laid down some ground rules. Kyle could have anything she had sent him in Iraq as well as anything related to their life together in Alaska. "I tried to be accommodating," he said. "I understood her issues and where she's coming from. I was pretty patient with that."

Kyle sent him a list of everything she could remember and then asked for one thing more. She wanted something that was with him when he died -- his dog tags or a killed-in-action bracelet he was wearing for a friend. That request turned out to be the breaking point.

Ren told her it was morbid and asked whether she really understood what dog tags were used for. She took his words as him telling her how she should grieve. They haven't talked since, preferring an uneasy silence to words they would regret.

When someone is killed like that, she said, a strange impulse creeps up among the survivors to rank their pain against one another's: father, best friend, sister, fiancee. It's a pointless exercise, though. In the end, everyone loses.

* * *

When Kyle moved back to Washington that summer, she carried what little she had of Michael's things onto the plane with her, afraid it would be lost from her luggage. She had spent the summer crying. At times, the pain was suffocating, like someone was sitting on her chest. She needed to find some way to move forward without feeling like she was leaving him behind.

She arrived in Washington still wearing the ring on her left hand. It represented the future she and Michael had sketched out, a plan she was trying to keep alive.

This is how it was supposed to go: He would retire from the Army and get a job as a SWAT team medic or physician's assistant. They'd use a VA loan to buy a place in Washington, where she would enroll as a graduate student at George Washington University.

She was determined to follow through on their plan and threw herself into classes at GWU. But sometimes the pain was unavoidable. Classmates and strangers would see the ring on her finger and get excited, asking her whether she was engaged. She never knew what to say. When is it ever okay to bring up your dead fiance?

Through the nonprofit Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS, Kyle found other women to talk to and helped start an e-mail chain specifically for mourning fiancees. By e-mail, she asked all the questions she couldn't ask other people. The women told her how they dealt with the pain and what they had done with their rings.

Heeding their advice, on the anniversary of her engagement last year, Kyle moved the ring to her right hand.

* * *

The future is again uncertain. Kyle reached the end of their two-year plan this month, graduating with a master's in women's studies.

She still talks frequently with Michael's mother and one of his sisters. She keeps pictures of him by her bed and desk. "I still think about him every day," she says, "but that can't be all that I am."

She has asked other fiancees about dating but isn't completely at peace with the idea. Flirting with other men feels wrong. Maybe if a man pursued her on his own, she'd consider it -- a military man, though, who could understand what she has been through, what she is still going through.

For now, life is too busy anyway. She accepted a full-time job this month at TAPS and is diving into the difficult work of helping others with their grief.

"Mike was a medic and took care of the guys in his unit," she points out. "Now I can help take care of their families."

As for the ring her fiance gave her and all that it represents, she still doesn't quite know what to do with it. Last year, on the day they were supposed to be married, she finally took it off her right hand.

These days, she keeps it on a long antique necklace tucked beneath her clothes -- hidden from strangers, but still close enough for her to touch.

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 4:07 am
So sad !

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 4:10 am
My heart with you Kyle you are brave courge faithful I feel so sad for you .. troops must return home who is responsable for that meaning less war who caused that sad must be punished ..

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 6:09 am
I wish that no one had to go to war, no innocent victims killed, no one lose a daughter, husband, son. There are so many victims of war, and it is all heartbreaking. If only the ones who have the power to declare war would only do so if they went to fight right alongside the ones they sent.

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 6:32 am

Uhoud, thank you for -- once again -- reminding us of the devastatingly painful personal losses of war. For each person lost, there are many mourners, and lives unalterably changed.

Bless you.

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 7:42 am
Uhoud as always dear- You bring the humanity of the people whom war touches and involves.Blessings hon

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 8:50 am
So sad, poor girl. Wars don't have sense to be. Noted with sadness:(
Thanks Dearest Uhoud.
Love, Black Dalia:(

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 9:40 am
Kyle is my friend she work now in TAPSS tragedy assistance program for survivels she help mothers children all those who lost beloved one in Iraq and Afganistan war thars rhe link
www.taps.org

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 10:22 am
Blessings Uhoud. My dear friend from Iraq. This story touches the heart strings of what love and loss means to it's victims. This illegal war has broken many a heart in America and in Iraq! Needless wars are started by fools. Brave Hearts, like Kyle's love, are sent to fight them! May "We" see peace in our time! Love your heart Uhoud, Barbara

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 12:27 pm
Women Under Siege By Lauren Sandler
This article appeared in the December 29, 2003 edition of The Nation.

December 11, 2003

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Take Action Write a Letter Subscribe Now Text SizeAAAAll the shades are drawn in Raba's house on a wide residential street in one of Baghdad's more affluent neighborhoods. Small daughters and nieces streak through a well-appointed living room, leaving giggles and shrieks in their wake, as their young mothers and aunts sip Pepsi from cans and make wry comments in the darkened space. None of these women leave this home, even so many months after the war came to its so-called end. And Raba, a usually spunky twentysomething, is afraid even to stand in her own doorway. "Before the war we were out until 2 o'clock in the morning all the time," she says. "Now I don't even bother to put on my shoes."


Lauren Sandler investigated issues of women and culture in Iraq on behalf of the Carr Foundation.

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Millions of women have found themselves living under such de facto house arrest since the coalition forces claimed Baghdad in April. They have been forced into this situation by a menacing triple threat that has emerged since the war: First, Saddam Hussein threw open the doors to his prisons in October 2002, releasing criminals onto Iraq's tightly policed streets. Then came the fall of the regime and the concomitant crumbling of law enforcement. And now, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is treating a growing human rights crisis for women as an extracurricular issue at best, leaving women at the mercy of thugs on the streets and the religious parties that have rushed into the political vacuum. Upwards of 400 women have been kidnapped in this city alone, according to various women's groups, and each horror story ripples with alacrity throughout each neighborhood. Raba's story is one of them. As she leans forward to fuss over a tiny niece, her auburn curls part to show a jagged line of black stitches that vertically bisect her scalp. "My wound from the war," she says with a sardonic laugh.

Raba and her fiancé were driving late one summer evening in his Toyota RAV 4 when they were attacked by a band of men engaged in a popular and profitable postoccupation occupation: carjacking. As they were violently booting the fiancé from the car, one of the men decided that Raba would make a nice addition to the evening's spoils. But as he was attempting to rape her in the back seat, the intrepid--more furious than afraid, she says--Raba pulled open the door handle and flung herself from the speeding car. The next day, her fiancé and her brother went to the police station to report the stolen car. They didn't file anything regarding the attempted rape, since, as she says, neither they nor the cops were interested.

"What did I learn from all of this? That what's important here isn't a woman's life, but a nice car," she says, closing the subject. She's more interested in talking about how she hasn't heard a word from her fiancé since the incident, and our conversation spirals easily into a lengthy eye-rolling and hand-squeezing conference on men and commitment--the sort of thing we should be discussing over brunch, or window shopping in the Mansour district, which everyone says is very fashionable but which these days feels like a ghost town. It's impossible for Raba and her relatives to imagine feeling safe anywhere but in this room these days, her sister comments as she jumps at the sound of what we hope is just a car backfiring outside. "You can't imagine what this time has done to us," she says. "This is not how anything was supposed to be."

If you talk to women throughout Bagdhad, from the brave few who venture out to beauty salons--some of which are now being targeted by fundamentalist groups--to many others at their dining tables, "This is liberation?" emerges as a constant, insistent refrain. Not that they feel any great nostalgia for life under Saddam. Far more women here have stories about husbands and sons who disappeared into mass graves and torture prisons under Saddam than tales of nieces and female neighbors who have gone missing since the war. And sexual violence was a hallmark of a regime that employed men to hold the job of "Violator of Women's Honor," who would videotape themselves raping the wives of men the regime perceived as suspect. But as women here will remind you, the advantage to living under a police state is that the streets feel safe. As demeaning, terrifying and tragic as life under a dictator was for Iraqis, threats were not random acts from random criminals but rather tightly controlled, deliberately deployed terrors. These days the sheer unpredictability of violence is what makes the fear so pervasive. Then, women may have been afraid to step out of line, but now they're afraid even to step outside their homes alone.

It's not hard to find women in Baghdad who tell stories of life since the war that make Raba's tale seem like a lucky break. Eighteen-year-old Zainab and 14-year-old Hanaa can't use their real names, since every day outside the semivacant office building they call home, a man who wants to kill them sits parked in a white car. The two girls were abducted and gang-raped in August when heavily armed former neighbors of theirs burst into their front door late one evening. After several hours of torturous violence at gunpoint Zainab escaped. Hanaa wasn't so fortunate. She spent the next week blindfolded in an abandoned house. Each night her abductors would tell her she was to be sold the next day in the north, as part of a growing ring of trafficking in abducted women. But word got out that Zainab had gone to the police, and so they dropped Hanaa off at her doorstep with the threat that if she told anyone what had happened to her, her family would be murdered. Now every day the girls sit at home in pajamas in the empty rooms they share with their mother and small brother watching their sole luxury, a black-and-white television. Their captors were a prominent Baathist's son and his newly released felon cronies. "What do you expect?" said Zainab when I first met her in the hours before the gang dropped a trembling Hanaa at the door, when she thought she might never see her sister again. "They let out the criminals. They got rid of the law. Here we are."

Zainab and Hanaa say their only hope rests with the Iraqi police--a cruel irony. It turns out that once the police impounded the car used to abduct the sisters, they closed the case. The lead investigating officer, a portly, chain-smoking man with a shaved head named Major Hasan, refused to term the case kidnapping because the captors were known by the girls in their old neighborhood. "They knew them, yes? So how is it kidnapping?" he says. His treatment of the case is hardly unique--it's standard practice. "All cases that have to do with kidnapping, they are lies, they are not real. And after the war we haven't received any case of rape," says a thickly mustached Lieut. Khalil Majid Ahmed, who manages the all-male-staffed precinct. My questioning of this assertion was met with livid bellowing. "Has anyone tried to assault you? No? So how can you judge? This subject should be closed!" His second in command--with matching mustache--named Lieut. Col. Ra'ad Heider, elaborated vehemently, "Iraqi society has customs and traditions that keep us very well served. No American values are practiced here. Things that have to do with women, rape, that kind of thing--we will never follow American values!"

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Wednesday May 27, 2009, 12:29 pm

Yes it's sad...but i can only think of the iraq women who had their children, husbands, fiances, mothers fathers, brothers, sisters, stolen from them, butchered, tortured murdered ..raped. How many were there? I would like to hear more stories from Iraq UHoud. I don't have a lot of sympathy for Americans who CHOSE to join the military.I am disappointed that you are not writing about what is happening in Iraq. Whose side are you on??

نعم انها حزينة... ولكن لا يسعني إلا أن أفكر في العراق والذين كانوا يضعون النساء والأطفال والزوج ، والخطوبة والأمهات والآباء والأخوة والأخوات ، وسرقت منها ، وذبح وتعذيب وقتل.. اغتصاب. كم عددهم؟ أود أن أستمع إلى المزيد من القصص عن العراق UHoud. ليس لدي الكثير من التعاطف مع الاميركيين الذين انضموا الى military.I كنت أشعر بخيبة أمل لعدم الكتابة عن ما يحدث في العراق. الذين وقفت على حالك؟

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 12:34 pm
الولايات المتحدة ليست هي "الوصي" لحقوق الإنسان ، والكثير من الاميركيين لا يزالون يعيشون مع هذه مغالطة ؛ الولايات المتحدة قد أصبحت عكس ذلك ، ومبدع من البؤس والظلم. الشعب الأميركي يجب أن تقدم من طريق وير أمتهم تتخذ ، والجرائم التي ترتكب باسمهم ضد الأبرياء في جميع أنحاء العالم.

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 12:36 pm
Prior to the arrival of U.S. forces, Iraqi women were free to go wherever they wish and wear whatever they like. The 1970 Iraqi constitution, gave Iraqi women equity and liberty unmatched in the Muslim World. Since the U.S. invasion, Iraqi women’s rights have fallen to the lowest level in Iraq’s history. Under the new U.S.-crafted constitution, which will be put to referendum on the 15 October while the bloodbath mounts each day, women’s rights will be oppressed and the role of women in Iraqi society will be curtailed and relegated to the caring for “children and the elderly”.

Immediately after the invasion, the U.S. embarked on cultivating friendships with religious groups and clerics. The aim was the complete destruction of nationalist movements, including women’s rights movements, and replacing them with expatriate religious fanatics and criminals piggybacked from Iran, the U.S. and Britain. In the mean time the U.S. moved to liquidate any Iraqi opposition or dissent to the Occupation.

The creation of paramilitary death squads – from the SCIRI and Al- Da’wa militias – tied to the current puppet government and Iran have been terrorising Iraq’s secular communities and assassinating large number of prominent Iraqi politicians and professionals (see Robert Dreyfuss - Death Squads and Diplomacy). By using one group against the other, the US is dancing to the ongoing violence and the prospect of civil strife, while its corporations are siphoning off Iraqi resources and assets.

During his stint in Baghdad as the U.S. Proconsul, L. Paul Bremer often appeared with pro-Occupation women groups to foster the myth that the U.S is “liberating Muslim women”, while at the same time signing laws that were detrimental to women’s rights. Like George Bush and Tony Blair, Paul Bremer is no feminist, but he used feminism’s rhetoric to enforce Western imperialism. “Whether in the hands of patriarchal men or feminists, the idea of feminism essentially functioned to morally justify the attack[s] on native societies and to support the notion of comprehensive superiority of Europe [and America]”, wrote Leila Ahmad, professor of women’s studies and an expert on gender at Harvard University. Hence, feminism serves as the “handmaid of colonialism”, added Ahmed.

Since March 2003, Iraqi women have been brutally attacked, kidnapped and intimidated from participating in Iraqi society. The generation-old equality and liberty laws have been, replaced by Middle Ages laws that strip women of their rights and put them in the same oppressive life as women in Afghanistan, the nation which the U.S. invaded to “liberate” its oppressed women. The 1970 Iraqi constitution is not only the most progressive constitution in the Muslim World, but also the most equal. Iraqis were mentioned only as “citizens”, and Iraqi women’s rights were specifically protected.

In December 2003, the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) – constituted mostly of the current puppet government – approved resolution 137, which will replace Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Laws with religious law to be administered by conservative religious clerics from different religious groups with different interpretation of Islamic laws. The laws could affect women’s rights to education, employment, and freedom of movement, divorce, children custody and inheritance. The 55-member Constitutional Committee, who allegedly drafted – under the American radar – the new constitution, is only 17 per cent women. Like the January elections, the drafting of the constitution was undemocratic and lack public participation. Amid the escalation of violence, Iraqis are asked to vote on a constitution they do not understand. Many Iraqis believe “the new constitution weakens the state and strengthens religion within the government”, which can be used to suppress people’s rights and freedom in general and women’s rights in particular. Its main purpose is to legitimise the Occupation and the puppet government. Iraqis, women in particular do not need a constitution; they need peace and security.

Under previous governments, “Iraqi women have enjoyed some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, under a civil code that prohibits marriage below the age of 18, arbitrary divorce and male favouritism in child custody and property inheritance disputes”, as accurately described by Pamela Constable of the Washington Post. “Saddam did not touch those rights, but the U.S.-appointed IGC have voted to wipe them out”, added Pamela Constable. It is noteworthy that due to women’s participation in the Iraqi society, modern Iraq was an important cultural powerhouse before the invasion. It exported education, including arts and sciences to the rest of the Arab World.

Sadly, no where Iraqi women have been more betrayed than among women groups in the Middle East. When Karen Hughes, the Undersecretary of State and Bush’s personal confident went to friendly Middle East dictatorships to sale the war and lecture them on women’s rights. Her trip was dominated by friendly meetings with audiences filled with U.S.-friendly women and groups who received U.S. funding and consisted mostly of exchange students. Shameful as it was, these Arab women had no concern for the suffering of their sisters in Iraq, and remain silent despite the oppression they endure themselves under despotic regimes.

Only among Turkish women the opposition to the war has been apparent even before the occupation. When Hughes went to Turkey, Turkish women turned the table around and lectured her on women’s rights and democracy. According to the Washington Post, Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Turkish women's rights activist told Hughes; “War makes the rights of women completely erased and poverty comes after war -- and women pay the price”. Vargun has also denounced the arrest of Cindy Sheehan, the America who protested against the war at an antiwar protest.

Today, many Iraqi women have been abused, tortured and raped by U.S. forces. A large number of Iraqi women are still in U.S.-run prisons without charge and without access to lawyer. Two prominent Iraqi female scientists, Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha, a biologist and Dr. Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a microbiologist are still imprisoned without charge since the invasion. Former UN chief inspectors – David Kay and Hans Blix – have questioned the continued detention of Iraqi scientists, including the two female scientists, by US forces.

The continued detention of Iraqi scientists without charge and incommunicado appears to violate international law, said the human rights group, Amnesty International. “Women have been subjected to sexual threats by members of the U.S.-led forces and some women detained by U.S. forces have been sexually abused, possibly raped”, added Amnesty International in its February 2005 report. Given Amnesty International interest in the treatment of prisoners and prison conditions, one would expect Amnesty International to be more vocal than just paying lip service.

“There are no lawyers allowed for the detainees and no information is given about the reason or the evidence surrounding the detentions, Amal Kadhum Swadi, a prominent lawyer in Baghdad, told the WTI in Istanbul, Turkey. “In the process, Iraqi women are being raped. One woman was bleeding for three months and the raping continued. There was no health service. The media does not mention these facts or the fact that all of Iraq has become a prison”, added Swadi. Indeed, there are more prisons in Iraq today than at any time in Iraq’s history.

Indeed, Western mainstream media, Western propagandists, and women movements are deliberately concentrating on the role of Islam in the new constitution, ignoring the Occupation as the main violator of Iraqi women’s rights. Iraq has been a secular society for generations. Iraqi women are more literal with their Islam than any of the surrounding dictatorships who alleged to live according to Islamic laws. Since the U.S. Occupation, Iraqi women started to cover their heads which is continuously promoted in Western media as the face of oppressed Iraqi women. On the contrary, the percentage of Iraqi women in traditional wear was miniscule before the invasion. The brutality of the U.S. Occupation and the violent nature of the US military created the right conditions for the current violence against women.

All evidence shows that violence has increased dramatically since the invasion, because it served the U.S. main objective. “Several [Iraqi] politicians [in the puppet government] have actually suggested that the U.S. is involved in the sectarian killings in Iraq; encouraging sectarian strife with the aim of weakening the Iraqi nation and destabilizing the country, which would justify extending its military presence there”, reported Al-Jazeera on 04 October 2005.

U.S.-instigated violence and the miserable living conditions created by the Occupation have forced Iraqi women to lock themselves in their homes. And even in their homes, Iraqi women are less safe today than before the invasion. U.S. forces and their collaborators continue to raid, Iraqi homes days and nights, accompanied by terror and human rights abuses of Iraqi women and their families. Iraqi women are arrested, detained, abused and tortured not because of anything they have done, but to force their close relatives (spouses, sons and brothers) to collaborate with the Occupation and inform against the Resistance fighting to defend their people and Iraq’s independence.

The U.S. is not the “guardian” of human rights, as many Americans still living with this fallacy; the U.S. has become the opposite, a creator of misery and injustice. The American people should be made a ware of the path their nation is taking, and the crimes it is committing in their name against innocent people around the world.

What ever Americans think of their nation and the crimes their government committing against innocent people, “for the people of Iraq and the rest of the world, [the torture and abuses of human rights] will serve as a reminder of America’s unyielding sadism against those who have the misfortune of living under its occupation”, wrote Dr. Joseph Massad of Columbia University in New York. “The [Occupation] proves that the content of the word[s] ‘freedom’ [and “liberty”] that American politicians and propagandists want to impose on the rest of the world [are] nothing more and nothing less than America’s violent domination, racism, torture, sexual humiliation, and the rest of it”, added Dr. Massad. The U.S. Occupation of Iraq proves that freedom and liberty were not the words the United States was founded upon.

The only hope left for Iraqis to gain their freedom and liberty is the immediate and full withdrawal of U.S. troops, and their collaborators from Iraq. The forming of an Iraqi government based on national unity and independence should provide laws that are legitimate and that guarantee human rights for all Iraqis.

Global Research Contributing Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 1:52 pm
Forgive me for ranting Uhoud..I know you have a wonderful heart full of understanding and forgiveness. I love you as a sister.
It is difficult for me to forgive the complicity of the American people however, who have chosen to remain ignorant about the truth and only seem concerned about the USA.

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 2:41 pm
The American dream, shattered like Kyle's heart and dream. Like millions of other hearts and dreams in Iraq, and thousands in the USA, courtesy of the US governments & their lies.

There must be something that can be done, to prevent all these tragedies...

Noted with deep sadness.

Wednesday May 27, 2009, 5:50 pm
Apparently, many soldiers are committing suicide at this point. This insanity is becoming more insane..., if that is possible...
I wish they would get the American troops the heck out of the Middle East, period. A couple siblings of mine are very distant with me, because of my personal position, but that is their choice. I know of some dark evils that are mounting in the Middle East, but the destruction of Iraq was unacceptable to me, our support of Israel's actions towards the Palestinians, is unacceptable to me, and our historical entrenchment and special ops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran are both unacceptable and digressing in all aspects.

America's severe lack of action with China, to bring an end to genocide in Darfur, is disgusting. Africa, Burma, Tibet....., are all suffering so much, but our leaders refuse to implement severe sanctions. children are starving to death, if they aren't murdered, first. This is a multi-headed beast filled with atrocities that challenge me so much.

Noted with a heavy heart..., thank you for sharing this, dear friend...

Thursday May 28, 2009, 6:49 pm
AniTa thank you for your love respect to my dearest country Iraq ...Yes eaxh house in Iraq suffer from the American occupation and from what related from that Occupation ...
I know all the women you mention to in your comments
Huda Azawi my dearest friend arreasted twice one in Abugreab and second in crober there is burn from cigarates in her body.. she released with sorry ... you are unguilty .. lier inspector cause her arreast ...
Huda Amash released now .. and Dr. rehab too they arreasted because they are sintests .. there are more and more but the true must known no body rape them in American prisions abused maybe heart yes ..
About Amel Swadi the iraqi lawer she is not famous I know her very well.. she is the lawer of Huda Azawi .. but she did nothing to Huda I helped Huda .. by calling Amenisteal .. I am in Hudas house now and she asked me to tell you the truth ..
Love you AniTa