Truthdig - Ear to the Ground - U.S. Builds Wall in Sadr City

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U.S. Builds Wall in Sadr City

nytimes.com / Joao Silva

Got a problem? Build a wall. Baghdad’s Al Quds Street, where the barrier is being installed, has become a porous demarcation line between the American- and Iraqi-protected area to the south and the militia-controlled area to the north.

Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood turned refuge for Iraqi insurgents, is getting a infrastructural makeover this week as workers begin building a wall to isolate the area from the rest of the capital city. U.S. forces say the construction is a security measure to stem anti-U.S. and anti-coalition activity.

The New York Times:

Trying to stem the infiltration of militia fighters, American forces have begun to build a massive concrete wall that will partition Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite neighborhood in the Iraqi capital.

The construction, which began Tuesday night, is intended to turn the southern quarter of Sadr City near the international Green Zone into a protected enclave, secured by Iraqi and American forces, where the Iraqi government can undertake reconstruction efforts.

“You can’t really repair anything that is broken until you establish security,” said Lt. Col. Dan Barnett, commander of the First Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry Regiment. “A wall that isolates those who would continue to attack the Iraqi Army and coalition forces can create security conditions that they can go in and rebuild.”

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TAGS: baghdad barrier capital coalition forces construction fence insurgents neighborhood sadr city security shiite wall

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By PatrickHenry, April 20 at 7:04 am #
(1114 comments total)

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!

Wrong republican.

Building walls and tearing them down, hard to believe Thomas Jefferson had anything to do with the Republican party.

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By bozhidar bob balkas, April 19 at 6:58 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

zionism just another ism

Every ism wants to destroy every other ism. Some isms are more perilous than, let’s say, buddhism.
Socialism, to rich people worldwide, is the most perilous ism imaginable and capitalism wants desperately to destroy all socialisms.
Will one of the worst, or worst ever, ism, the zionism destroy all other isms? or will it be destroyed?
Facts of great import gives us clues/hints that zionism will be destroyed. thank u gods. I also thank the devil of my own. thank u

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By DennisD, April 18 at 5:11 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Sadr can't see us

Things will be going so much better there once we entomb the entire country. So who got the latest no-bid contract.

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By purplewolf, April 18 at 11:15 pm #
(567 comments total)

Re: Sadr can't see us

HALLIBURTON OF COURSE!

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By cyrena, April 18 at 2:54 pm #
(4165 comments total)

Sadr City Another Gaza-Like Prison

This isn’t news of course. The wall building began at least a year ago, maybe longer. We just didn’t begin to hear about it until then, but the Iraqis knew what was coming as the ‘surge troops’ began constructing these very thick cement walls, (topped with barbed wire) around entire neighborhoods throughout Iraq…allowing for one entry and exit only, to manned by US troops.

At the time, it was necessary to wall-up all of THOSE neighborhoods, because the US was being prevented from getting to the oil. Too many Iraqis getting in the way of the theft teams.

And now this. To suggest that this creation of another Gaza (open air prison) in Iraq is for security, is enough to make me as sick as it made me when they began erecting the same over a year ago.

It hasn’t been enough to kill at least a million innocent Iraqi citizens, and displace another 4 million. Nope. Now the US has to create a prison for those who remain, and have the utter contempt to claim that it’s something other than what it is..the continued imprisonment of the remainder of the population of a yet another nation that the US has invaded and occupied in the most brutal ways imaginable. Even the British never got even close to this in their own occupation of Iraq.

Meantime, the other part of the dangerous duo (The Terrorist Twins that are the US and Israel) are continuing to do the same in the West Bank, and Israel has just killed several more Palestinians in Gaza, including 5 children).

Gaza Fighting Kills 20 Palestinians, Including Five Children

By Diaa Hadid
The Associated Press
Wednesday 16 April 2008

Gaza City, Gaza Strip - Israel struck hard against targets in Gaza on Wednesday, killing at least 20 Palestinians in a day of heavy fighting that also saw three Israeli soldiers killed in a Hamas ambush.

Several civilians were among the dead - including five children and a Reuters cameraman killed while covering the conflict, according to Palestinian officials.

The surge in violence came after a relatively quiet month and threatened to unravel an Egyptian effort to mediate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

Wednesday’s death toll was the highest since a broad Israeli military offensive in early March killed more than 120 Gazans, including dozens of civilians. Since then, Israel and Hamas appeared to be honoring an informal truce, though punctuated with Palestinian rocket attacks, some Israeli airstrikes and minor border skirmishes.

The rest at the link:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041708M.shtml

Meantime, Sadr City is intended to become the same trap, and it will simply make it easier for all of the bombs that are currently being dropped on Sadr City from the air, to hit that many more innocent civilians. Because of course, that’s what they are. The US calls any Iraqi who resists occupation and imprisonment an ‘insurgent’.

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By purplewolf, April 18 at 11:40 pm #
(567 comments total)

Re: Sadr City Another Gaza-Like Prison

Now America has RESERVATIONS in Iraq as well as at home. Makes you proud doesn’t it-NOT. Are these walled cities a answer to Bushs wet dreams he experienced in his youth when he thought about all the concentration camps his granddaddy helped to build with his generous donations to Hitler? Did Bush authorize Chertoff to select plans for these “camps” also as he has done with the FEMA camps here in America. Haven’t heard about them? No surprise there, as with almost everything this administration had done to keep the public in the dark from super editing of any news that might reach the American public to fabricating what poses as news now-a-days and dumbing down the population. Denying all the news of the casualties of this war from reaching the public at all,(used to be able to find the weekly deaths of our military on the web, had been a minus for some time not),to secret laws created and passed into law in the dark, hidden from the people, done in the wee hours of the mornings and away from those who once had the powers to stop this insane power grab and destruction of everything America once stood for.

These acts have brought shame unto America and her people in the eyes of the world, which will never look up to America as an example of something they might want to emulate. Will we ever recover from this atrocity? Thank you G.W., your legacy will go down in infamy, you have brought shame unto the people of America and yet you claim you have no problem sleeping at night. Well that proves you don’t have a soul. Your reign of terror can not end soon enough.

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By TDoff, April 18 at 1:43 pm #
(203 comments total)

This is how to subdue a nation, and restore ‘law and order’, by restricting, walling-in (or walling-out) segments of the population, restricting their freedom.

Democracy, I hardly recognize you.

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By jatihoon, April 18 at 1:41 pm #
(147 comments total)

Wall from Palestine to Iraq/

Israeli lobby in U.S has infiltrated Bush admistation. They have convinced, Bush and Co that wall building has worked in West Bank and it will work in Iraq. Israeli advise, not only “good walls makes good neighbors”, but also protect them from bullets.” Arab do Arab does”, is the new U.S. policy.

Arizona, here I come. Who build the greatest wall not Chinese Emperor, but President Bush, history in making.

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By nefertiti, April 18 at 1:29 pm #
(80 comments total)

Oh my God , is that how the new iraq going to Look ? a divided iraq with walls everywhere . the zionists started it on the Palestinian territories and now the Americans exported the idea , just when we thought the Berlin wall was an ugly thing . Shame . (sectarianism did not exist prior to the invasion , it was PLANNED , started in 2002 by the US media ) half of the people in Saddam gov were shias , remember his information minister the funny ALI ? he was shias and tareq Aziz was christian .

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By Outraged, April 18 at 11:00 am #
(869 comments total)

Re: Gmonst

I agree. Did concrete manufacturers donate heavily to the republican party or something? Or are those in charge simply psychotic? Or BOTH! What is with these people? Are they so shortsighted they can’t envision the reality of their actions?

These “fixes” leave a person dumbfounded.

Robert Frost: Mending Wall
(excerpt)
“There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

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By Gmonst, April 18 at 9:30 am #
(44 comments total)

It sometimes feels like we are living in some kind of fairytale with a moral at the end about human fear and folly. All this wall building, ever more numerous, ever bigger is just so surreal to me. Our leadership seems blind to itself and utterly incapable of even the most rudimentary understanding of the perspectives of others. Did we not learn anything from watching the Soviet Union during the cold war? We are becoming more and more like the old U.S.S.R. all the time, only with bigger and more numerous walls. When you wall someone out, you also wall yourself in. Let’s just cower in our cage of consumption, destroy ourselves with fear and mistrust, and become a moral to the story. Maybe future generations with show a better predilection for learning from the past.

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By Jeff, April 18 at 10:39 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

Re:

Do you lock your doors and night?

“When you wall someone out, you also wall yourself in”

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By cyrena, April 19 at 2:24 am #
(4165 comments total)

Re: Re:

Actually Jeff, not everyone DOES lock their doors at night. Far more now than in decades past, but even so, it hasn’t happened everywhere.

And, have you considered the consequences of walling oneself ‘in’? It hasn’t actually worked out all that well for Israel.

Matter of fact, Israel has the walls, and oh so many nukes besides, and their big old tanks, and their airplanes and their bombs.

But, where can THEY go? Do they feel ‘safe’ with all of that? Gee, they don’t seem to. I mean, they can’t much use their nukes without some of that deadly stuff getting to them as well. So, how comfortable is it really, to be ‘walled in’.

And of course it goes without saying that the Iraqis won’t be safe. They’ll just be in a fishbowl, all the better to be targets of the US military by air.

Do you think there might ever be some consequences to that, for us right here in the good ol US of A?

Like maybe another 9/11 actually perpetrated in retaliation this time, instead of by our own government, disguising itself as ‘the enemy who has reason to retaliate’?

Think your locked doors are gonna help you out there? Maybe the walls would work better? I dunno. Those were some pretty large buildings that blew up on 9/11...they even had walls.

And, they (the alleged terrorists) even TOLD us why they wanted to terrorize us...because of us doing stuff like this, and supporting Israel in the same activity.

So, just because they didn’t get to it before our own government did doesn’t mean that they don’t still have the same reasons for revenge, and we just keep giving them more.

And, that REALLY pisses me off!

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