No subject

the right to say anything about what the Americans are doing. They hold the
machine guns, and we don't. Is this the new, George Bush democracy?

We are calling for democracy. We want our voices to go out to the world with
no fear. But that is not possible because we are not free. We are not free
to move, especially at night. We are not allowed to film near any U.S.
military (just like with Saddam!). Al-Jazeera TV was threatened and accused
that they were not showing the right (American) viewpoint, and their live
pictures of the war were not true, and so their office got bombed and one of
their reporters were murdered because the American government was not
pleased with their programs. Is this the new, George Bush democracy?

Voices in the Wilderness was banned from working at the Palestine hotel
because they did some writing that showed part of this reality. So they had
to be stopped. So where is the democracy? Where is the freedom?

We don't even have the right to protect ourselves and our families. We see
crimes that are committed, and we can't stop them. We can't even say "no" to
anything the American soldiers are doing, even if it is illegal.

For example, the weapons that they find now, in the city, they are
destroying them in the middle of Baghdad - in the city where children,
women, and men live, with no concern for what it might do to the properties
of the people, and some of our people have lost their lives and houses
because of those destructions. They don't have any other place to live. Who
is responsible for that?

In addition to that, the pollution that these destructions are causing to
the environment, and the diseases that might appear because of no clean
water, and not enough medicines, threaten all of us.

Who is in charge of this? Who is responsible for all these crimes? Or this
the new, George Bush democracy, where no one can say, "No!"?

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Posting
by Salaam Talib Al-Onaibi

(No verified email address)  14 May 2003

After the fall of Baghdad, no one to cared for the patients at Al-Rashed
Psychiatric Hospital. Many of the inmates fled to the street. One of the few
that remain is a poet named Abed Al-Kareem, who came to Al-Rashed after
being arrested several times by Saddam's regime. An educated man, he never
seemed crazy. Abed Al-Kareem choose to stay in the hospital because he felt
more freedom there, to write his poetry. He dedicated these few lines from a
poem of his to the people of Iraq:

When will this oppression end?
And the Rulers who do what they want with people?
Honorable men expelled from their homes,