Kurdistan Commentary

Jalal Barzanji, Kurdish poet and journalist, will soon release The Man in the Blue Pyjamas: Prison Memoir in the Form of a Novel, his memoirs about the time he spent imprisoned under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The first draft of the book, completed in 2007, was written in Kurdish. After many rounds of revisions and translations, the novel will be available in April 2011 from University of Alberta Press.

‘It is a narrative about a part of my life which I (held) for years in my heart and memory,’ says the author.

The part of his life Barzanji speaks of is from 1986-1989, during which time he endured imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime because of his literary and journalistic achievements—writing that openly explores themes of peace, democracy, and freedom. For those three years, Barzanji wrote only on scrap paper, smuggled in to his cell in Iraq.

As an outspoken critic of the censorship under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Barzanji had been fully expecting to be either imprisoned or executed. ‘The regime was against freedom, and I was asking for freedom. I wasn’t a follower of the ideology and mentality of the regime. My pain was double – I was a modern writer and I was Kurdish…I was living in fear because I knew I was doing something dangerous, talking about peace, democracy, freedom,’ he said.

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Stephen Lendman

Since taking office, Obama achieved the impossible - compiling a worse record than his fiercest critics feared, worse than George Bush across the board on domestic and foreign policies. He:

● looted the nation's wealth for Wall Street;
● wrecked the economy;
● consigned millions to poverty, unemployment, and bleak futures;
● expanded unbridled militarism and imperial wars;
● spied more aggressively than ever on Americans;
● destroyed decades of hard won labor rights;
● targeted Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for erosion and elimination;
● further institutionalized public wealth transfers to super-rich elites who already have too much;
● commodified public education;
● subverted Net Neutrality;
● targeted whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, and environmental and animal rights activists as terrorists;
● militarized Haiti, engineered fraudulent elections, and provided no desperately needed aid;
● gave drug, insurance and hospital chain giants greater control over healthcare, rationing it and making a dysfunctional system worse;
● made America more than ever a police state, including by targeting immigrants, holding thousands in hundreds of unlisted, unmarked detention facilities in nearly every state before secret courts deport them, at times stranding them far from home countries.

On October 6, the Los Angeles Times headlined, "US deported record number of illegal immigrants," saying:

"For the second year in a row, the government deported more illegal immigrants during the last fiscal year than ever before, according to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) figures."

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Angola 3 News interviews Dahr Jamail

Bradley Manning, suspected source of Wikileaks

Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent nine months reporting directly from Iraq, following the US invasion in 2003. His stories have been published by Antiwar.com, Inter Press Service, Truthout, Al-Jazeera, The Nation, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, the Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Independent, and many others. On radio as well as television, Dahr reports for Democracy Now!, has appeared on Al-Jazeera, the BBC and NPR, and numerous other stations around the globe.

Jamail is the author of two recent books: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist (2008) and The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse To Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (2009). He also contributed Chapter 6, "Killing the Intellectual Class," for the book Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered (2010). Learn more at dahrjamailiraq.com

Angola 3 News: On April 4, 2010, WikiLeaks.org released a classified 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter in Iraq, firing on civilians and killing 11, including Reuters’ photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, 40 year old Saeed Chmagh. No charges have been filed against the US soldiers involved.

In sharp contrast, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning has been accused of leaking the classified video. Arrested in May and facing up to 52 years in prison for a range of charges, Manning is now being held under what lawyer/journalist Glenn Greenwald has termed "inhumane conditions."

Manning’s support website declares that "exposing war crimes is not a crime." Indeed, the Nuremberg Laws, established after the horrors of WWII, declare that soldiers have a legal obligation to resist criminal wars. Let’s please take a closer look at this issue of US war crimes. What do you think are the strongest arguments that have been made for why US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal?

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