posted on April 12, 2007 05:36:53 AM new
Or will the neocon repugs say this is just media bias ???
Explosion Rocks Iraqi Parliament; 2 Dead
Updated 7:44 AM ET April 12, 2007
By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA
BAGHDAD (AP) - A bomb rocked Iraq's parliament building
in the heavily fortified Green Zone Thursday,
killing at least two lawmakers in a stunning security breach in the third month of a U.S.-Iraqi crackdown on violence in the capital, officials said.
At least four other people were wounded in the blast, which shook a cafeteria while several lawmakers were eating lunch, initial media reports said.
Mohammed Awad, a member of the Sunni National Dialogue Front, was killed in the blast, said Saleh al-Mutlaq, the leader of the party, which holds 11 seats in Iraq's legislature. Another female Sunni lawmaker from the same list was wounded, he said.
A security official at the parliament building said a second lawmaker, a Shiite member, also was killed. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Apparently concerned that an attack might take place, security officials at the parliament were using sniffer dogs earlier Thursday as people entered the building _ a rare precaution.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which is also in the Green Zone, said no Americans were injured in the blast.
"We are aware of reports of an explosion in the Green Zone. We are investigating the nature and source of the explosion," spokesman Lou Fintor said. "No Embassy employees or U.S. citizens were affected."
"Several people were wounded, including members of parliament and some employees," Mohammed Abu Bakr, who heads the media department at the parliament, said.
The attack came hours after a suicide truck bomb exploded on a major bridge in Baghdad, collapsing the steel structure and sending cars tumbling into the Tigris River below, police and witnesses said. At least 10 people were killed.
Hospital officials said another 26 were injured, and police were trying to rescue as many as 20 people whose cars plummeted off the al-Sarafiya bridge.
Waves lapped against twisted girders, as patrol boats searched for survivors while U.S. helicopters whirred overhead. Scuba divers donned flippers and waded in from the riverbanks.
Farhan al-Sudani, a 34-year-old Shiite businessman who lives near the bridge, said the blast woke him at dawn.
"A huge explosion shook our house and I thought it would demolish our house. Me and my wife jumped immediately from our bed, grabbed our three kids and took them outside," he said.
The al-Sarafiya bridge connected two northern Baghdad neighborhoods _ Waziriyah, a mostly Sunni enclave, and Utafiyah, a Shiite area.
Police blamed the attack on a suicide truck bomber, but Associated Press Television News footage showed the bridge broken apart in two places _ perhaps the result of two blasts.
Cement pilings that support the steel structure were left crumbling. At the base of one lay a charred vehicle engine, believed to be that of the truck bomb.
"We were astonished more when we saw the extent of damage," said Ahmed Abdul-Karim, 45, who also lives near the bridge. "I was standing in my garden and I saw the smoke and flying debris."
Locals said the al-Sarafiya bridge is believed to be at least 75 years old, built by the British in the early part of the 20th century.
"It is one of Baghdad's monuments. This is really damaging for Iraq. We are losing a lot of our history every day," Abdul-Karim said.
The al-Sarafiya bridge has a duplicate in Fallujah that was built later and made infamous in March 2004, when angry mobs hung the charred bodies of U.S. contractors from the bridge's girders.
"This bridge is linked to Baghdad's modern history _ it is one of our famous monuments," said Haider Ghazala, a 52-year-old Iraqi architect.
"Attacking this bridge affects the morale of Iraqis and especially Baghdad residents who feel proud of this bridge. They (insurgents) want to demolish everything that connects the people with this land," he said.
Before the al-Sarafiyah bridge was destroyed, nine spans across the Tigris linked western and eastern Baghdad.
The river now serves as a de facto dividing line between the mostly Shiite east and the largely Sunni west of the city, a reality of more than a year of sectarian fighting that has forced Sunnis to flee neighborhoods where they were a minority and likewise for Shiites.
Baghdad's neighborhoods had been very mixed before the war but hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced since then as militants from both Muslim sects have sought to cleanse their neighborhoods of rivals.
There have been unconfirmed reports for months that Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida in Iraq were planning a campaign to blow up the city's bridges. U.S. military headquarters near the Baghdad airport and the Green Zone, site of the U.S. Embassy and Iraqi parliament and government, are both on the west side of the river.
Also Thursday, the U.S. military said its troops killed two suspected insurgents and captured 17 in raids across the country.
___
Associated Press Writer Lauren Frayer contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed
posted on April 12, 2007 03:27:28 PM new
The liberals continue fighting to act like cowards and have us admit defeat and get out of Iraq ASAP.
They SAY we shouldn't stay because it's just a civil war and we can't do much about that.
Many of the anti-war liberals SAY we should be searching for binladen/AQ/fighting the taliban IN Afghanistan - not wasting our time in Iraq.
But they don't pay much attention to WHO it is we're fighting in Iraq.
Matter-of-fact...they continue to post articles that say it's NOT AQ we're fighting it's just "Iraqi's" - and that the Iraqi's AREN'T going to 'follow us home'.
Well....once again they're proven to be wrong.
Yep....AQ terrorists....the same ones they CLAIM won't follow us home if we do leave Iraq.
Can they PROVE that will be the case? No, of COURSE NOT...it's just differing opinions from them against what our CIC and military leaders tell us.
We NEED to stay there and stablized Iraq....and DEAL with the AQ who ARE THERE AND TAKING CREDIT FOR THESE MURDERS.
==========
The Iraq Parliament Attack:
Al-Qaeda Sends a Message
Thursday, Apr. 12, 2007 By BRIAN BENNETT/BAGHDAD
People leave the scene of a bomb blast inside the Iraqi Parlilament building, April 12, 2007.
In an assault apparently aimed at chilling negotiations between the Iraqi government and a faction of the insurgency, the Iraqi Parliament, located in Baghdad's high-security Green Zone, suffered a bomb attack.
An official at the Ministry of the Interior told TIME that the bomber was wearing a suicide vest and was likely a guard for one of the members of parliament.
The blast went off just after 2 p.m. on Thursday at the cafe in the central atrium of the building just outside the main hall where politicians, staff and journalists often meet for a cup of tea or a plate of food from a buffet spread.
Eight people were killed — including three members of parliament — and dozens wounded in the blast.
Two secondary bombs were found, apparently set to mow down those fleeing the initial blast, said the Interior Ministry official.
One was in a briefcase inside the building, he said, and another in the parking lot outside. One of the detection machines leading into the Baghdad Convention Center, where Parliament is housed, was not operating Thursday, said the official, who was suspicious of a wider plot.
U.S. forces have sealed off the building and are conducting an investigation into the blast.
Two weeks ago, Coalition forces found two suicide vests inside the Green Zone and there was speculation about the presence of a third in the area.
Within an hour of the explosion, a message from the al-Qaeda-controlled Islamic State in Iraq was posted on a prominent militant website, http://www.muslm.net, calling the blast a "message" to anyone who cooperates with "the occupier and its agents."
It said ominously, "We will reach you wherever you are"
The extremists want to stop efforts of reconciliation between the Iraqi government and an Iraqi-led, nationalist faction of the insurgency that has turned on al-Qaeda in recent weeks.
That was the likely motive in an earlier attack on March 23, when Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie was hospitalized after an attack reportedly carried out by a guard who detonated a suicide vest at al-Zubaie's compound on the edge of the Green Zone.
Al-Zubaie, a Sunni from a powerful tribe west of Baghdad, is an important promoter of the reconciliation policy.
Recently, gunfights and tit-for-tat executions have erupted in west Baghdad between the nationalist Battalion of the 1920 Revolution and al-Qaeda-backed fighters.
Last week, an influential nationalist group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, asked Osama bin Laden to reign in al-Qaeda in Iraq's more extreme tactics such as targeting Iraqi civilians and brutally enforcing Sharia Law.
Just hours before the explosion in Parliament, a suicide truck bomb collapsed the Al-Sarafiyah bridge in Baghdad. Some 10 people were killed as their vehicles fell into the Tigris River below.
The sagging steel trusses of the bridge, which was built by British engineers over half a century ago to connect the predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood Atafiyah with the Sunni area of Waziriyah, provided another sad reminder to residents of the widening sectarian divisions in the capital.
==================
Anyone HERE STILL think the AQ can't do ANOTHER attack IN America, on OUR soil?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
Ann Coulter
[ edited by Linda_K on Apr 12, 2007 03:40 PM ]
posted on April 12, 2007 07:21:50 PM new
Experts bash Bush: Pullout won't bring 'enemy' to U.S.
By WILLIAM DOUGLAS
McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON - It's become President Bush's mantra, his main explanation for why he won't withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq anytime soon.
In speech after speech, in statement after statement, Bush insists that ''this is a war in which, if we were to leave before the job is done, the enemy would follow us here.”
The line, which Bush repeated Wednesday in a speech to troops at California's Fort Irwin, suggests a chilling picture of warfare on America's streets.
But is it true?
Military and diplomatic analysts say it isn't. They accuse Bush of exaggerating the threat that enemy forces in Iraq pose to the U.S. mainland.
''The president is using a primitive, inarticulate argument that leaves him open to criticism and caricature,” said James Jay Carafano, a homeland security and counterterrorism expert for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy organization. ''It's a poor choice of words that doesn't convey the essence of the problem - that walking away from a problem doesn't solve anything.”
U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic experts in Bush's own government say the violence in Iraq is primarily a struggle for power between Shiite and Sunni Muslim Iraqis seeking to dominate their society, not a crusade by radical Sunni jihadists bent on carrying the battle to the United States.
Foreign-born jihadists are present in Iraq, but they're believed to number only between 4 percent and 10 percent of the estimated 30,000 insurgent fighters - 1,200 to 3,000 terrorists - according to the Defense Intelligence Agency and a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center-right research center.
''Attacks by terrorist groups account for only a fraction of insurgent violence,” said a February DIA report.
While acknowledging that terrorists could commit a catastrophic act on U.S. soil at any time - whether U.S. forces are in Iraq or not - the likelihood that enemy combatants from Iraq might follow departing U.S. forces back to the United States is remote at best, according to experts.
James Lewis, a U.S. foreign policy analyst at CSIS, called Bush's assertion oversimplistic.
''There's a grain of truth in Bush saying it's better to fight them there rather than here, but it's also overstated,” Lewis said. ''It's not like there's going to be gun battles in the United States.”
Daniel Benjamin, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank, agreed.
''There are very few foreign fighters who are going to be leaving the area because they don't have the skills or languages that would give them access to the United States,” said Benjamin, who served as the National Security Council's director for transnational threats from 1998 to 1999. ''I'm not saying events in Iraq aren't going to embolden jihadists. But I think the president's formulations call for a leap of faith.”
''The war in Iraq isn't preventing terrorist attacks on America,” said one U.S. intelligence official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he's contradicting the president and other top officials. ''If anything, that - along with the way we've been treating terrorist suspects - may be inspiring more Muslims to think of us as the enemy.”
Carafano and Lewis believe that a U.S. troop pullout would embolden Islamic jihadists, but that they're much more likely to stay closer to home and spread violence to neighboring countries with poor records of combating terrorism, such as Somalia, Morocco, Algeria and perhaps Egypt, than they are to try to penetrate America.
Increased terrorism in those places would tax the United States, which would have to deal with the economic costs, global refugees and health crises that combat in those countries could produce.
''The danger is not that they'll follow us home,” Carafano said. ''The problems will come to our doorstep, not the terrorists.”
Lewis of CSIS believes that a U.S. pullout could prompt some foreign fighters in Iraq to go home, head to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces there or move to Europe, where Muslim anger is high and there are more Muslim communities to blend into.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on April 12, 2007 07:22:29 PM new
I wonder if the bombing took place in the same area where McCain said it was safe to walk the streets without any protection?
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on April 12, 2007 08:24:38 PM new
No, Logan, it took place in the supposedly SAFEST place in Iraq!
The stupid neocons will believe anything if you can get it on a bumper sticker....."fight 'em there or fight 'em here".
That has been proven so wrong but they still can't "get it".
Terrorists are EVERYWHERE....they can go wherever they can afford to go....PERIOD. Iraq is NOT the gateway to America...what scared little fools they are to believe that stupid slogan....
posted on April 12, 2007 09:32:33 PM new
See....again the anti-war, Bush haters SAY we don't need to fight AQ in Iraq.
And they probably don't want us fighting them in Afghanistan if they'd be truthful.
"The line, which Bush repeated Wednesday in a speech to troops at California's Fort Irwin, suggests a chilling picture of warfare on America's streets."
But is it true?
Well the SAME AQ we're fighting in Iraq...sure did a darn good job on 9-11. And it only took a very small number of them to pull it off.
YOU want that responsibility? No...I didn't think so.
Neither does THIS President.
Elect a coward from your own party and let the deaths of any further INNOCENT U.S.
CIVILIANS happen under HIS/HER watch then.
This President is doing his best to NOT allow it during his watch. As ALL Presidents should.
Military and diplomatic analysts say it isn't. They accuse Bush of exaggerating the threat that enemy forces in Iraq pose to the U.S. mainland.
posted on April 13, 2007 04:00:09 AM newagain the anti-war, Bush haters SAY we don't need to fight AQ in Iraq.
Nope, it is also military experts, some Republican and some of the troops, that also believe it.
[i]Elect a coward from your own party and let the deaths of any further INNOCENT U.S.
CIVILIANS happen under HIS/HER watch then.[/i]
Glad to see you are finally admitting that A REPUBLICAN COWARD WAS ELECTED IN 2000 AND AGAIN IN 2004. OVER 6,000 PEOPLE HAVE DIES DURING BUSH'S TERM IN OFFICE. The next president can not do any worse.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on April 13, 2007 06:43:32 AM new
And the drool continues:
""And they probably don't want us fighting them in Afghanistan if they'd be truthful.""
Probably? YOU ARE reading minds again ! ???
Well, ignoramous, Democrats in here and elsewhere have repeatedly stated they agree with going after terrorists in Afghanistan, especially Bin Laden, who is allegedly behind 9/11 even though BUSH says he's not important!!!
""""Well the SAME AQ we're fighting in Iraq...sure did a darn good job on 9-11. And it only took a very small number of them to pull it off."""
Sad you think it was a "good job" ! The people who flew the planes into the WTC were
SAUDIS
FROM SAUDI ARABIA....
YOU CANNOT DENY IT, the WORLD KNOWS IT you stupid bimbo who thinks "virsus" is a word!
AND terrorists are NOT confined to Iraq....how can you possibly, even in your horrendous stupidity , believe THAT!
There are terrorists all over the world and in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA RIGHT NOW ....
posted on April 13, 2007 08:28:53 AM new
And she rages on for another day
There ARE AQ in Iraq. They ARE funding and supporting the war there.
No reason to LEAVE like cowards, admit defeat and go off to Afghanistan.
After ALL ....all those Canadian troops AND NATO are THERE already, dealing with the taliban/terrorists AND AQ who are there too.
Those who want the US to admit defeat to terrorists are nothing, imo, but cowards.
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
Are YOU a Bunghole?