The Latest...

The electricity only returned a couple of hours ago. We've been without electricity for almost 72 hours- other areas have it worse. Today we heard the electricity won't be back to pre-war levels until the middle of next year.

We heard about Saddam's capture the day before yesterday, around noon. There was no electricity, so we couldn't watch tv. The first sign we got that something abnormal was occurring was the sound of a Klashnikov in the distance. I remembering pausing in my negotiations with E. over who should fill the kerosene heaters and listening hard to the sounds of shooting. I grabbed the battery-powered radio and started searching the stations, skipping from one to the other. I finally located a station that was broadcasting in Arabic and heard that Saddam may have been caught.

We thought nothing of it at first… another false alarm. It happened on an almost weekly basis. When the sounds of shooting became more frequent, curiosity got the better of E. and he ran to our neighbor's house where they had a small generator running. Fifteen minutes later, he came back breathless with the words, "They've caught Saddam…" Everyone was shocked. We all clamored for the radio once again and tried to find out what was happening. The questions were endless- who? What? When? How?

It was only later in the evening that we saw the pictures on tv and saw the press-conference, etc. By then, Baghdad was a mess of bullets, and men waving flags. Our area and other areas were somewhat quiet, but central Baghdad was a storm of gunfire. The communist party were scary- it's like they knew beforehand. Immediately, their red flags and banners were up in the air and they were marching up and down the streets and around Firdaws Square. My cousin was caught in the middle of a traffic jam and he says the scenes were frightening.
[more]

Capture Will Not Stop The Relentless Killings From Insurgents
by Robert Fisk

"Peace" and "reconciliation" were the patois of Downing Street and the White House yesterday. But all those hopes of a collapse of resistance are doomed. Saddam was neither the spiritual nor the political guide to the insurgency that is now claiming so many lives in Iraq - far more Iraqi than Western lives, one might add - and, however happy Messrs Bush and Blair may be at the capture of Saddam, the war goes on.

In Fallujah, in Ramadi, in other centres of Sunni power in Iraq, the anti-occupation rising will continue. The system of attacks and the frighteningly fast-growing sophistication of the insurgents is bound up with the Committee of the Faith, a group of Wahabi-based Sunni Muslims who now plan their attacks on American occupation troops between Mosul and the city of Hilla, 50 miles south of Baghdad. Even before the overthrow of the Baathist regime, these groups, permitted by Saddam in the hope that they could drain off Sunni Islamic militancy, were planning the mukawama - the resistance against foreign occupation.

The slaughter of 17 more Iraqis yesterday in a bomb attack on a police station - hours after the capture of Saddam, though the bombers could not have known that - is going to remain Iraq's bloody agenda. The Anglo-American narrative will then be more difficult to sustain. Saddam "remnants" or Saddam "loyalists" are far more difficult to sustain as enemies when they can no longer be loyal to Saddam. Their Iraqi identity will become more obvious and the need to blame "foreign" al-Qa'ida members all the greater.

Yet the repeated assertions of US infantry commanders, especially those based around Mosul and Tikrit, that most of their attackers are Iraqi rather than foreign, show that the American military command in Iraq - at least at the divisional level - knows the truth. The 82nd Airborne captain in Fallujah who told me that his men were attacked by "Syrian-backed terrorists and Iraqi freedom-fighters" was probably closer to the truth than Major Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, would like to believe. The war is not about Saddam but about foreign occupation.
[more]

Meanwhile, in Iraq the slaughter goes on

Many had hoped the capture of Saddam Hussein would put an end to the insurgency that has been carrying out deadly attacks against US troops and Iraqi targets. But any such wishfulness was swiftly crushed when suicide bombers killed eight Iraqi policemen and injured at least 30 civilians in two suicide bomb attacks in Baghdad.

In what may well be a clear indication that the resistance to US occupation will continue despite the capture of the former Iraqi leader, two car bombs were detonated outside Iraqi police stations in different parts of the city.
[more]

Saddam’s Capture Means Trouble for U.S. Officials

In his official statement celebrating the capture of Saddam Hussein, President Bush announced that “the former dictator of Iraq will face the justice he denied to millions.” Notably lacking from the president’s statement, however, was whether the U.S. government would agree to relinquish control over Saddam’s trial to the Iraqi government or to an international tribunal consisting of independent judges.

Why wouldn’t U.S. officials readily agree to relinquish jurisdiction over Saddam’s trial? Because of their need to closely guard the secrets that Saddam Hussein has in his possession — secrets that would cause no small amount of embarrassment to the U.S. government, including former president Ronald Reagan, former vice-president and former president George H.W. Bush (the president’s father), and Donald Rumsfeld, the president’s secretary of defense.

One of those secrets is the extent of the relationship that existed between the Reagan and Bush I administrations and Saddam Hussein, the details of which have never been fully disclosed by U.S. officials. There is, of course, the famous photograph on the Internet in which Rumsfeld and Saddam are shaking hands and making conversation in Baghdad in 1983. How did that meeting get set up? Who was involved in the decision-making process? What was discussed? What agreements were entered into?

Saddam’s testimony at trial could provide some of the answers. And that prospect — of Saddam Hussein testifying freely, openly, and publicly about his relationship with Ronald Reagan, President Bush I, and Donald Rumsfeld — would undoubtedly strike terror into the hearts and minds of many U.S. officials.

Imagine if the exact nature of the relationship between Reagan-Bush and Saddam Hussein were to hit the front pages of newspapers all over the world on a daily basis, as Saddam filled in his side of the details during his public testimony at trial.

And there’s a bigger secret, whose details would undoubtedly terrify U.S. officials even more — that it was the Reagan-Bush administration that furnished Saddam Hussein with the weapons of mass destruction (1) that he employed against the Iranian and Iraqi people, and (2) that U.S. and UN officials used as the excuse for imposing the brutal 12-year embargo against Iraq, whose resulting deaths of Iraqi children arguably were a principal motivating factor behind the September 11 attacks, and (3) that President Bush ultimately relied upon as his principal justification for invading Iraq.
[more]

  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan