"Killings, kidnappings and torture remain widespread" in Iraq, according to the UN report. 

"In some Baghdad neighborhoods, women are now prevented from going to the markets alone," the report says.  Attorney Nadia Keilani told an audience at a recent San Diego teach-in that

if a woman leaves her house with her head uncovered, she is often stopped and her head shaved as a warning.  The next time, she is beheaded.

Keilani's 26-year-old cousin leaves her home in Iraq only three times a month.  She spends her days looking through a peephole.  "She is a prisoner in her own home," Keilani said.

Homosexuals are "increasingly threatened and extra-judicially executed by militias and 'death squads' because of their sexual orientation," the UN reported.

"Attacks against teachers, university professors and students as well as extremists inside universities resulted in numerous deaths and an increasing number of academics and intellectuals leaving the country," the UN found.

Eighty-four percent of the colleges have been destroyed, Keilani noted.

Kidnappings proliferate, according to the UN.  Many hostages are killed even after the ransom is paid.

The "extent of the violence in areas" other than the Kurdish region "is such that likely every child, to some degree, has been exposed to it," the UN report says.

Yesterday's New York Times reported: "Iraq's anemic investigative agencies have been ill-equipped to keep up with soaring crime, so for families seeking information, the morgues have often provided the only certainty."

Yet people who go to the morgue to retrieve their loves ones are often kidnapped and killed if their identity card says Sunni instead of Shiite.

Things are going so badly in Iraq that the tours of 4,000 US soldiers who had been slated to leave have been extended for up to four months.

Iraq's leaders elected under occupation with Bush's blessing are refusing to toe the line.  Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, called the US invasion of Iraq "the work of butchers."  He said the US government wanted Iraq "to stay under the American boot."

"Leave us to solve our problems," al-Mashhadani declared.  "We don't need an agenda from outside."

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is caught between Iraq and the Bush place. 

At a Washington news conference last week, al-Maliki criticized Israel's air strikes in Lebanon and urged an immediate ceasefire "to stop the killing and the destruction."

A resolution of the Iraqi parliament had called Israel's attacks "criminal aggression."

In an attempt to appear more pro-Israel than the Republicans, twenty congressional Democrats called for the cancellation of al-Maliki's address to a joint session of Congress because he wouldn't condemn Hezbollah.

Al-Maliki addressed Congress as planned, but forgot to mention the war on Lebanon for some reason.

An influential Iraqi Shiite cleric, Sheik Aws Khafaji, called al-Maliki's visit to Washington a betrayal of Islam and a humiliation to the Iraqi people.  "What forced you to eat with the occupiers?", Khafaji asked.  "Is that your reward?  You know more than anybody else that the car bombings, terrorism, explosions and bloodletting in Iraq are under the protection of the Zionist-American plans."

This morning, Bush said "the status quo in the Middle East" led to the 9/11 deaths.

He's right, but for the wrong reasons.  It was not Iraq, Hezbollah, Iran or Syria that perpetrated the September 11 attacks.  It was al Qaeda.  What was Osama bin Laden so upset about? US-UN sanctions against the people of Iraq, US bases in Saudi Arabia, and US-Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

=====================

Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to MWC News Magazine , is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.

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