Some of my notes about the bigotry issue are obscure and not detailed well. They are untouched.

This was a series of articles and interviews surrounding Molly Bingham, she capture and time in Abu Gahraib, her release and return. She and Michael Gordon from the New York Times were the only journalists that gained the trust of the Iraqis in rebellion. She and Gordon verified Bush was propagandizing regarding al Qaeda in Iraq and indeed the 'insurgents' were Iraqis.

...................................................

You are still a religious bigot, Germany. You had to sneak in that little dinner time prayer. I don't want to hear how you are allowed. It is unbalanced and just like Bob Jones is allowed to exist you have a leaning. I don't want to hear how it is justified because of Soros appearance. Did he pray? I didn't think so. Besides that it is a 'tit for tat' issue with you. In other words if Soros is out there then so am I even though there are plenty of times when that balance doesn't exist.

YOU ARE A RELIGIOUS BIGOT.

Talk to Karl and Georgie and ask if there is a 12 step program for your malady.

There might be some hope but I doubt it.

Ms. Barrett

The American Dead Segment - 29, 27, 26, 20 Uhles, Drew

Local Papers
The Eugene Register Guard Pre deaths Steve PreFontain
Placers In The Oregonian
Tregedy hits home – Springfield Oregon


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5217043/

return to Iraq

Molly Bingham, jailed in Abu Ghraib by Saddam's regime in the run up to the war, returned afterward to photograph the insurgency

Freelance photographer Molly Bingham, sitting beside Newsday editor Jim Rupert, talks with reporters in Jordan after her release from Abu Ghraib on April 2, 2003.
Bingham and Rupert were among the group of journalists being released from an Iraqi prison.

Updated: 9:50 a.m. ET June 21, 2004

Award-winning photojournalist Molly Bingham was arrested by Iraqi police while covering the Iraq war last year. "They drove us to a place I didn't know where we were going," she says. That place turned out to be Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

"Every other moment of every day it was like, are they going to kill me?"

Bingham recalls the torturous sights and sounds from inside Abu Ghraib.

"You could hear they were in physical discomfort," she told MSNBC's Deborah Norville.

After her release, Bingham insisted on returning to Iraq, and in the wake of Saddam's fall, she did some of her best work, infiltrating the Iraqi insurgency and capturing some startling images of its bomb makers at work. She's been chronicling their exploits with her cameras, as well as in a recent article for “Vanity Fair.”

Bingham shared some of her thoughts with MSNBC's Deborah Norville on Tuesday. Below, is a transcript.

On having been in Abu Ghraib

DEBORAH NORVILLE, HOST: What went through your body and your mind as suddenly you realized, “I've just been taken hostage”?

MOLLY BINGHAM, PHOTOJOURNALIST: I didn't really have any sense of how it was going to play out. It was just the moment-to-moment anxiety of not knowing, “Are they going to kill me? Are they going to dump me in the river? Are they going to chain me to something important? Are they going to take me to a site where Saddam Hussein is and say you can't bomb it because we have Western journalists here with him?”

I didn't know. And really it was about five or six hours from the time I was first detained to the time I was taken away. And that period was very difficult, because I didn't know where I was going.

NORVILLE: You didn't know if you were actually being kidnapped in the beginning, right?

BINGHAM: Well, I didn't know whether I was being taken prisoner. I didn't know whether I was being taken to the Syrian border. I didn't know whether I was going to a prison or to a detention facility of some kind.

And when I arrived at Abu Ghraib, I didn't know where I was because I had never been there. I knew it was clearly a prison once I got inside, but I didn't know that was about it. So it was all a big mystery.

NORVILLE: When you see the videotape that we've seen quite a bit of since those notorious photos came out, do you see things that look familiar to you?

BINGHAM: Sure. This was the prison that I was in. I was in the Arab and foreigner section, which was isolation chambers, which were 6-by-9-foot cells with a metal grate door with no facilities in it. So you had to ask. There was a bathroom down the hall to go to the bathroom. And you were fed in the cell. So it was quiet, no conversation, and alone for eight days.

NORVILLE: And yet, you could hear other things that were going on in the prison that was pretty horrific.

BINGHAM: Yes. In particular, there was one night, there was another prisoner, I presume, who was being beaten pretty badly by the other guards in the hallway right outside of my cell.

NORVILLE: So that would have been a foreigner or an Iraqi? BINGHAM: I don't know. I literally turned my face to the wall and didn't watch and didn't want to be seen to be hearing anything or seeing anything.

I think all of us had the same reaction. And Matt McAllester wrote about it in his book as well. You just wanted to ignore it. You wanted to be seen ignoring it and not be interested.

NORVILLE: Ultimately, how were you all released? BINGHAM: We were all released one day, on April 1. They were going to drive to us Jordan. They were going to take to us Baghdad first and get our passports stamped. And on the way, driving out of the prison, the airstrikes started on the road to Baghdad.

And so they said, “Oh, okay, you're not going to leave right now.” And they put us in another cell all together for the first time, with all of our gear, all of our suitcases and everything. And we ended up staying overnight the last night. And so the next morning, they put us in GMCs and we were driven to the border, to the Jordanian border.

On going back to Iraq

NORVILLE: In less than three weeks, though, you got yourself back across as a freelance journalist, not assigned to any particular news organization. Why have you felt such a compulsion to be in Iraq, to report this story and to take the pictures that you have?

BINGHAM: I think it took a lot of resolve to go in the first place before the war. I knew I was taking a risk. I knew it was going to be dangerous. I knew that there were things like being in prison that I could face.

And being a photographer and being in prison for eight days during really the most important part of the days of the war there, and then missing the few days after—I felt like I needed to go and do what I originally went to do. I thought, “Okay, now it will be different and I can go and work there and I won't have that sort of oppression and fear that I had before and tell the stories that I want to tell.”

The first story I went back and told was about female political detainees under Saddam's regime and finding some of those women and talking to them about their experiences. And part of that was very helpful to me in getting through my understanding of what happened to me and my feelings about that, and just building relationships with Iraqis and having the kind of journalistic experience that I hadn't been able to have there before.

On insurgents

NORVILLE: Over the past year, you’ve tried to find out what causes ordinary Iraqi men and women to become insurgents. You talked to everyday people who have made that decision—teachers, shopkeepers, mothers. You’ve been chronicling their exploits with her cameras. One of the things, Molly, that I think I don't understand is, who are these people? We say insurgents, as though they wear a sign that says, “Hello, my name is insurgent,” and we can lump them all together.

BINGHAM: Right. I didn't know exactly what I was going to find when I went. And I thought it was important to understand who these people are who are opposing the occupation of the country. And what I found was largely that they are normal people. Some of them hold down day jobs. Some of them move weapons. They use whatever skills they have. Some of them are fighters. Some of them are sort of thinkers and policy strategists who are figuring out what to do.
They're very normal people. They don't have sort of insurgent stamped on their forehead or horns growing out of their heads. They're very normal people who really have one ambition. And that is self-determination for their country, which is defined by American and foreign military and political influence withdrawing from their country.

NORVILLE: You've had very intimate conversations with a lot of people over the last year. How do they square the notion that they wouldn't have the possibility to self-determine their political future if the Americans hadn't come in?

BINGHAM: I think the 15 or 20 people I spoke to, some people actually liked Saddam Hussein. Some of them never liked him. Some of them never liked him and now like him and think he is great and appreciate what he did for the country. Almost all of them said, “We didn't invite to you come here. We didn't want to you come here. The people that asked to you come here are exiles, people who didn't live here. They didn't suffer through what we suffered through.”

They also say, “We want to determine what our own choice is. And either Saddam Hussein would have died. We could have taken care of that ourselves. But now that you've done it, OK, it is history. Leave us alone. Let us do this ourselves.” They all share that.

NORVILLE: You say that the insurgents have a huge advantage over the American military. For what reason? BINGHAM: I think it's a psychological advantage. They're obviously militarily at a disadvantage, because they don't have the kind of firepower. But, as one of the characters said to me, “This is our field. We play as we choose. We pick the time. We pick the place. We pick the weapon.” And they've done that, I think, quite effectively. It started off early on with very simple attacks, AK-47s, sometimes RPGs. That developed into IEDs and bombs used on the roadsides. And they actually changed that tactic. Many of them told me they changed that tactic because of the number of civilian casualties that were getting hurt when they were attacking the Americans.

NORVILLE: So they realized they were hurting their own people in the process of fighting the Americans. BINGHAM: Exactly. And in that process, the Americans and the Iraqi police built higher walls, put up concrete blast walls, and sort of pushed back from the population. So they started using bigger bombs, car bombs, mortars. So, they were responding. They're very flexible and very intelligent in about how they're going about it.

NORVILLE: You also say the Americans can't say why they're there, but the Iraqi people can say why they’re fighting.

BINGHAM: Certainly. One of the characters in Iraq said to me, “We know what we're fighting for. The American soldier that's here, he doesn't know what he's fighting for. And when he dies, he'll to go hell. And if he survives, he will live in hell here in Iraq. For me, I fight. I die. I go to paradise. If I don't die, I fight and I go to paradise later because I'm fighting jihad.”

NORVILLE: There are two people who you give names to, because anybody who spoke to you for the record would have been killed for sharing their knowledge with you. One of them you call “the teacher.”

BINGHAM: Teacher is a very interesting character. He spent his entire life in education. He didn't like Saddam Hussein because he found that the level of education in his field went down significantly over the last, particularly over the last years of his reign during sanctions. And he had no love for him. He said, “He never did anything for me. I was a simple guy. I wasn't interested in politics. I wasn't interested in doing anything.”

And when the war came, he saw foreign fighters came, Fedayeen fighters came to his area of Adamiyah of Baghdad and were fighting for God. They were fighting for Allah and they were fighting against the Americans. And he saw this battle unfold in front of him. And he ended up helping some of the Arab fighters to find their way around, navigate the streets of the city, which they didn't know.

And in seeing them lay their lives down for defending Iraq, he was inspired by that, literally. And he said, “I didn't know my way to the mosque before. I wasn't a particularly religious guy.” He was really created by the American occupation—by the war and the American occupation. He wouldn't have done and been involved in any of this before.

So he said: “Within a week, I was lucky enough to find a group of people I agreed with, within a week after the end of the war, find a group of people I agreed with. And I started moving weapons for them. I do weapons procurement for them.”

NORVILLE: You have been back and forth into Iraq a number of times over the last year. What do you think the final resolution of this saga is going to be?

BINGHAM: It's a great question. I think, without full political and military independence, certainly the people I spoke are going to keep fighting. And they're keep fighting and dying and killing until they feel that they've reached a level of self-determination, independence.

NORVILLE: Molly Bingham, it is a terrific article in “Vanity Fair” magazine. And the photos are amazing.

BINGHAM: Thank you.

Insurgents Are Mostly Iraqis, U.S. Military SaysBush, Kerry and Allawi have cited foreign fighters as a major security problem.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/whitehouse/la-fg-insurgent28sep28,1,2164152.story?coll=la-news-politics-white_house

By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and many U.S. officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq to battle American troops runs counter to the U.S. military's own assessment that the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem.

In a U.S. visit last week, Allawi spoke of foreign insurgents "flooding" his country, and both President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, have cited these fighters as a major security problem.

But according to top U.S. military officers in Iraq, the threat posed by foreign fighters is far less significant than American and Iraqi politicians portray. Instead, commanders said, loyalists of Saddam Hussein's regime — who have swelled their ranks in recent months as ordinary Iraqis bristle at the U.S. military presence in Iraq — represent the far greater threat to the country's fragile 3-month-old government.

Foreign militants such as Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi are believed responsible for carrying out videotaped beheadings, suicide car bombings and other high-profile attacks. But U.S. military officials said Iraqi officials tended to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government.

"They say these guys are flowing across [the border] and fomenting all this violence. We don't think so," said a senior military official in Baghdad. "What's the main threat? It's internal."

In interviews during his U.S. visit last week, Allawi spoke ominously of foreign jihadists "coming in the hundreds to Iraq." In one interview, he estimated that foreign fighters constituted 30% of insurgent forces.

Allawi's comments echoed a theme in Bush's recent campaign speeches: that foreign fighters streaming into the country are proof that the war in Iraq is inextricably linked to the global war on terrorism.

Kerry has made a similar case, with a different emphasis. In remarks on the stump last week, he said that the "terrorists pouring across the border" were proof that the Bush administration had turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign fighters hoping to kill Americans.

Yet top military officers challenge all these statements. In a TV interview Sunday, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, estimated that the number of foreign fighters in Iraq was below 1,000.

"While the foreign fighters in Iraq are definitely a problem that have to be dealt with, I still think that the primary problem that we're dealing with is former regime elements of the ex-Baath Party that are fighting against the government and trying to do anything possible to upend the election process," he said. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.

U.S. officials acknowledge that Iraq's porous border — especially its boundary with Syria — allows arms and money to be smuggled in with relative ease. But they say the traffic from Syria is largely Iraqi Baathists who escaped after the U.S.-led invasion and couriers bringing in money from former members of Hussein's government.

At the behest of the interim government, U.S. forces last month cracked down on traffic along the 375-mile Syrian border. During Operation Phantom Linebacker, U.S. troops picked up small numbers of foreign fighters attempting to cross into Iraq, officials say.

Yet the bulk of the traffic they detected was the kind that has existed for hundreds of years: smugglers and Syrian tribesmen with close ties to sheiks on Iraq's side of the border.

Top military officers said there was little evidence that the dynamics in Iraq were similar to those in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when thousands of Arabs waged war alongside Afghans to drive out the Soviet Union.

Instead, U.S. military officials said the core of the insurgency in Iraq was — and always had been — Hussein's fiercest loyalists, who melted into Iraq's urban landscape when the war began in March 2003. During the succeeding months, they say, the insurgents' ranks have been bolstered by Iraqis who grew disillusioned with the U.S. failure to deliver basic services, jobs and reconstruction projects.

It is this expanding group, they say, that has given the insurgency its deadly power and which represents the biggest challenge to an Iraqi government trying to establish legitimacy countrywide.

"People try to turn this into the mujahedin, jihad war. It's not that," said one U.S. intelligence official. "How many foreign fighters have been captured and processed? Very few."

Terror Plot in Ohio Thwarted; State Department Cites Wrong Terrorism Figures
Aired June 14, 2004 - 22:00 ET

BROWN: Back now to Iraq. We've often said that penetrating the fog of war can be tricky business, so many factors contributing to the haze, not the least of which language.Take the word insurgent, for instance. With each new attack we hear about suspected insurgents, a label that makes for easy shorthand but which says little about the attackers or their motivations."Vanity Fair's" Molly Bingham has been in Iraq since before the beginning of the war, a harrowing experience that was too. In the magazine's July issue, she looks beneath the label at the people behind the insurgency and we're very pleased to have her with us tonight. It's nice to see you.

MOLLY BINGHAM, "VANITY FAIR" WRITER: Honored.

BROWN: Well, is there -- there are lots of insurgencies aren't there?

BINGHAM: Yes.

BROWN: It's really not one thing and the administration often I think over simplifies what it is.

BINGHAM: It's definitely not monolithic and when you try to make generalities about them you definitely get into trouble. There are Sunni. There are Shia. There are people who are nationalists. There are people who are Islamically motivated. There are bakers. There are wives. There are teachers. It's a very broad insurgency or resistance as you could call it and it's broadly supported.

BROWN: To what extent are they interconnected?

BINGHAM: The different groups you mean?

BROWN: Yes.

BINGHAM: Some are very highly coordinated and others are not. There are some that are as small as sort of a neighborhood watch, maybe 40, 50 guys who get together and do small operations when they can or when they want to and then there are very highly coordinated elements like Mohammed's Army or Mohammed's Army II, which have cells all over the country and coordinate their operations in different parts, different regions, so some of them are very highly coordinated and communicate between each other.

BROWN: Why would they talk to you?

BINGHAM: I think they talked to me because they wanted to. They were being called terrorists repeatedly on television and they -- the first thing almost all of them said to me is we're not terrorists. We're defending our homeland.

BROWN: What did you do go into Baghdad and dial 1-800-Insurgency and whoever answers you say, hi, I'm Molly Bingham?

BINGHAM: I went back to a gentleman I met last spring, who in a completely passing comment said, by the way, I'm a member of the resistance and that was in May and I went back in August and I happened to be able to find him and I started to talk to him.And then after that basically what I did is sit in tea shops in this one neighborhood of Baghdad called Adamia and people were curious about who I was and people were curious about what I was doing there and eventually people would come around and start talking to me and they would start talking about the situation and the occupation and what they didn't like about what was going on.And eventually, people sort of appeared and, as it became clear that someone was more active, rather than just saying I don't like it, I'd sort of pull them aside and say, well, you know, are you interested in telling me more about who you are as a person and why you're doing this, and a lot of them agreed.

BROWN: Do they believe that they can drive the Americans out?

BINGHAM: That is certainly their goal.

BROWN: Do they believe that though?

BINGHAM: They will fight until they do or they die. That is certainly their conviction. That's the one thing all these different groups and people share is American troops off the soil.

BROWN: So, take out of the equation the Islamic fundamentalists for a minute and even the Saddam dead-headers or whatever the administration...

BINGHAM: Dead-enders.

BROWN: Yes, dead-enders, whatever they are, and just talk about people in neighborhoods who are tired of the occupation, tired of the -- they will fight to the death. Will they give this new government a chance?

BINGHAM: I don't think so and that's a guess. That's conjecture. I asked them often would you accept a U.N., you know, U.N. support for a government? Would you accept a new government that was elected?And basically they all said if it has any fingerprints, any feeling of American influence, no we won't accept it. We want to determine our own future. We want to choose our own government, you know, style of government that works for us and the first step to that is removing American military or foreign military forces from our soil.

BROWN: Real quick, you done in Iraq now? You spent a lot of time there.

BINGHAM: Yes, I'm going to take a break from doing this kind of work for just a little bit.

BROWN: Nice to see you.

BINGHAM: Thank you.

BROWN: The piece in "Vanity Fair" this month. It's a perfect piece of work. It's nice to meet you.

BINGHAM: Thanks, Aaron.

BROWN: Hope you'll come back after your fellowship and tell me about that too. Thank you.

The Religious Bigotry of NewsNight's Morning Papers Segment

The Washington Times

The Christian Science Monitor

The Guardian
The Philadelphia Inquier
The Detroit News
Boston Herald
The Chicago Sun Times – weather.

Sharon von Zwieten's Propaganda has always been a troubled aspect of the American Landscape.

This is actually an answer to a message board at the NY Times after Wolfowitz had written an editorial for them. The last paragraph is most stark in realizing the 'discovery' over time I have been experiencing and continuing to do so, is actually realized by authority at very high levels of global operating stability.

I am not alone in my assertions. Kindly note the last paragraph, I'll note it twice.


Wolfy, I find the title to your editorial STRANGE...

...but, I guess that is nothing new for someone who wants COMPLETE control of Islam.

"The First Draft of Freedom"

There is nothing new about the concept of 'freedom' in Indonesia. What I do find interesting is that you and your buddy Bush always seem to focus on OPEC countries which of course Indonesia is one. The ‘problems’ of civil unrest in Indonesia revolves around the intolerance of religions within Indonesia, namely Muslim and Catholic. The government of Indonesia has worked to ‘contain’ the violence but in an island country that is also commercially ‘a tropical paradise’ it is difficult to strike a balance.

I suggest your friend, Mr. Harimuti, is that his name, find an appeals court if indeed he is not guilty because it sounds as though the government has a case. Maybe you could pull some strings for him. Although I doubt Bush's Administration has much clout in Indonesia these days.

You know, Wolfy, when 9-11 first occurred President Megawati paid a personal visit to the Oval Office within days, kindly note citation below.

U.S. and Indonesia on Terror and Tolerance

Joint Statement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Indonesia on Terrorism and Religious Tolerance

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/2 [...]

During her time with George Bush she advocated tolerance of the Muslim Religion and a caution that the way the USA does business in the world has resulted in the attacks of September 11th. That of course was before the illegal invasion into Iraq, so I doubt the relationship then still continues. Since that visit there have been innumerable JOURNALISTIC pieces (Since you seem to ‘respect’ journalists as friends.) stating that the USA in it’s self righteous approach to ‘terrorism’ under Walker Bush causes the very human rights violations it states it’s intentions are otherwise.

Kindly note citations below: Indonesia, East Timor and the Western Powers

http://www.pcug.org.au/~wildwood/01decpowers.htm

A Case Study of The Role of Western Foreign Policy in Conflict Creation and Peace Sabotage

“In the wake of the 11th September 2001 attacks on the United States, the formation of an international coalition against terrorism under American leadership has been based on the conventional premise that Western civilisation has some sort of superior moral status within world order which permits it to be the principal initiator of a war on terror. The idea that the Western powers may have a systematic role in perpetrating terror, undermining democracy and promoting human rights abuses around the world to secure their strategic and economic interests poses a severe challenge to the notion that the West can play a meaningful role in combating terror…”

“In the wake of the 11th September 2001 attacks on the United States, the formation of an international coalition against terrorism under American leadership has been based on the conventional premise that Western civilisation has some sort of superior moral status within world order which permits it to be the principal initiator of a war on terror. The idea that the Western powers may have a systematic role in perpetrating terror, undermining democracy and promoting human rights abuses around the world to secure their strategic and economic interests poses a severe challenge to the notion that the West can play a meaningful role in combating terror…”

. . . The idea that the Western powers may have a systematic role in perpetrating terror, undermining democracy and promoting human rights abuses around the world to secure their strategic and economic interests poses a severe challenge to the notion that the West can play a meaningful role in combating terror…”

That is from Institute for Policy Research & Development, Suite 414, 91 Western Road, Brighton, East Sussex, BN1 2NW, United Kingdom.

Other citations can be found here:

http://www.pcug.org.au/~wildwood/crimes.htm

continued... the message continued but is not featured hear.

The stark reality of June 8, 2005 is in realizing the invasion into Iraq with Bush and Blair repeatedly standing by their original rhetoric; was actually an economic invasion for the oil glut of Iraq gives more and more credence to those words spoken some time ago:

The idea that the Western powers may have a systematic role in perpetrating terror, undermining democracy and promoting human rights abuses around the world to secure their strategic and economic interests poses a severe challenge to the notion that the West can play a meaningful role in combating terror…”