And they never once criticized Saddam

Nothing will stop our enemies from slandering our troops, falsely accusing them of atrocities, after remaining silent for years while Saddam committed these against Iraqis.

Witnesses at anti-war tribunal slam US actions in Iraq

The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), an anti-war grouping of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), intellectuals and writers, heard witnesses condemn the United States for rights abuses and the worsening plight of Iraqi women.

A former US Air Force pilot called on US troops in Iraq to "resist" the orders of their superior officers in an "illegal war".

"Today Iraq has been turned into a vast prison," lawyer Amal Sawadi told the hearing.

"They come to people's houses in the middle of the night, when everyone is asleep, blow in the door. They point their weapons in people's faces ... they search women in front of their families, they smash everything in the house."

She said lawyers had problems getting news of their imprisoned clients and spoke of rapes and humiliations which amounted to the "systematic practice of torture."

The only journalist present in the city of Fallujah when it was attacked in April and November 2004 said the assault on it amounted to "genocide".

Fadhil Al Bedrani, of the Al-Jazeera network, told how a 70-year-old man died for lack of medical supplies and of the stench of rotting bodies "abandoned in the streets and eaten by animals."

The plight of Iraqi women has worsened badly since the occupation, Hana Ibrahim, an Iraqi feminist said.

"From the day the occupation started there have been systematic violations of women's rights. They have been kidnapped, raped and even taken to other countries by criminal networks," she said.

She said 90 percent of women were out of work, women were now "almost non-existent in social life" while "prostitution was developing" and more and more women were reduced to begging....

About 200 non-governmental organziations -- including the environmentalist group Greenpeace, the anti-globalisation ATTAC and Vietnam Veterans Against the War -- as well as a number of prominent intellectuals such as US linguist Noam Chomsky and Egyptian sociologist Samir Amin are involved in the WTI.

Ah yes, Noam Chomsky, who's so cowardly anti-war that he'd have capitulated to France in 1870. And the Marxist Samir Amin, who also considers himself a Maoist? He's written a lot of tripe like this.

A police state that breaks into your house at night, women being raped, assault on an entire city, bodies being left in the open to rot...those were things done to Iraqi civilians by Saddam Hussein, not U.S. forces. Iraqis had their rights violated from the very first day of Saddam's "presidency" -- are the people cited and quoted in that article among Saddam's displaced loyalists, that they make such apologies for his regime?

How strange that not even the new Iraqi government accuses the U.S. of bringing this terrible fate upon them. "Only on al-Jazeera!" should sound to us like a National Enquirer advertisement.