Iraqi Activist Taken Up by Bush Recants Her Views

[beetbox]

Iraqi activist taken up by Bush recants her views

By Andrew Buncombe

Published: 28 August 2005


She was the Iraqi activist who became a symbol of the possibility of a brighter future for Iraq.

Back in February, with blue ink on her finger symbolising the recent Iraqi election in which she had just voted, Safia Taleb al-Souhail was invited to sit with the first lady, Laura Bush, and listen to the President claim in his state of the union address that success was being achieved in Iraq. Her picture went round the world after she turned to hug Janet Norwood, a Texas woman whose son had been killed in Iraq.

But now it appears Ms Souhail, an anti-Saddam activist who became Iraq's ambassador to Egypt, may be having second thoughts about the "success" she celebrated with a two-fingered victory sign.

Having seen the negotiations for the country's constitution fall into disarray and the prospect of a secular constitution severely undermined, she expressed her concerns last week.

"When we came back from exile, we thought we were going to improve rights and the position of women. But look what has happened: we have lost all the gains we made over the past 30 years. It's a big disappointment. Human rights should not be linked to Islamic sharia law at all. They should be listed separately in the constitution."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article308604.ece

[Erika]

Women in Iraq will now lose their rights

as they will become subject to Sharia law. Their lives will be far worse than under Husseins secular government.

Thanks to W.

[jaysunb]

1. Nominated unread !!

n/t

[ovidsen]

2. A ship deserts a sinking rat. (n/t)

[Liberty Belle]

3. Kicked; nominating

[NNN0LHI]

4. She'll be fine when she returns to Iraq as long as she brings her burka nt

[intheflow]

5. Great, the Freepers at the pro-Bush rally were waving her photo around.

:eyes:



Original link at Free Republic: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1471900/posts?q=1&&page=1801

*On edit... I am unable to confirm that this photo is Ms. al-Souhail. I jumped to that conclusion from the OP article quote, "But now it appears Ms Souhail, an anti-Saddam activist who became Iraq's ambassador to Egypt, may be having second thoughts about the "success" she celebrated with a two-fingered victory sign."

But I'm leaving the photo up. Because whether the woman in the Freeper signs is Ms. al-Souhail or not, the OP doesn't bode well for her human rights as a woman in Iraq.

[alittlelark]

6. Another broken TOOL of BUSHCO.

They should take better care of their tools.

[seemslikeadream]

7. Exiled woman returns to fight for a free Iraq Nov.15 2003

Exiled woman returns to fight for a free Iraq


By Annia Ciezadlo
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES



BAGHDAD — "Do not think that because you are a woman you will not face the same fate as your father," the voice said to Safia al-Souhail over the phone.
Ms. Souhail's father, an exiled opposition leader, was assassinated in Beirut in 1994 by Iraqi agents posing as diplomats.
For the next nine years, she waged a fierce campaign to bring his killers, and Saddam's entire government, to trial for its crimes under international law.
She earned many such death threats. "I did not succeed," she said. "But I tried my best."
Today, Ms. Souhail, 38, is a leading candidate to fill the slot left vacant when Aquila Al-Hashemi, one of only three female members of the Iraqi Governing Council, was assassinated.
As the daughter of a powerful tribal sheik, and a longtime human rights activist, Ms. Souhail is an increasingly influential voice in Iraqi politics.
Her father, Sheik Taleb Al-Souhail Al-Tamimi, led a million-member Central Iraqi tribe called the Bani Tamim. When he was killed, she inherited the political leadership of the tribe.
Out of respect, and affection for the fiery Ms. Souhail, Bani Tamim loyalists call her "the sheikha."
"I'm used to it," she said, when asked if she is afraid to be in such a highly visible position, with daily attacks against U.S. troops and those who work with them.
"I spent so many years under the eyes of the regime's security forces."
Ms. Souhail is demanding quotas for women in Iraq's new government — not just in civil service, but in government ministries, in drafting the constitution and on the Governing Council itself.
"They have seats for Shi'ites, for Sunnis, for Kurds, for Assyrians," she said, pulling on a Marlboro Light, "and they didn't think that they should have" seats set aside for women.
Though Ms. Souhail's family left the country when she was 3 years old, after the Ba'athist coup of 1968, they kept close ties to Iraq.
The Mukhabarat, the regime's dreaded security forces, took notice. In Amman, Jordan, where Ms. Souhail got her bachelor's degree in political science and public administration, the Iraqi military attache paid the next-door neighbors to leave and then moved in with surveillance equipment.
While her father lobbied Arab kings and presidents for support, Ms. Souhail would stay close to the Iraqi-Jordan border, handing messages to his supporters inside Iraq.
After his group's first coup attempt failed, in 1993, Jordan's government asked Sheik Taleb to leave. He was planning another coup when two Iraqi agents shot him in the doorway of Ms. Souhail's sister's house in Beirut.
Ms. Souhail's status as a former exile has earned her criticism in some Iraqi newspapers and on the street. In Iraq, returning exile leaders are often accused of being American puppets, a charge that brings out the angry sheikha in her.
"If we wanted to be puppets, we could have been puppets of Saddam Hussein," she said, her dark eyes smoldering.

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031114-094724-7116r.htm



http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition

[Cha]

8. Finally with the bushwa

..the truth emerges..slowly but surely everything monkey-boy touches turns to shite.

[frictionlessO]

9. !Anyone got that freeper rally pic of her as a poster child? We should

photoshop her new feelings over it and post it around the internets some.

The one from their pro-war conflaguration in Crawford?

[newswolf56]

10. I believe imposing theocracy on Iraq was Bush's intention...

from the beginning: that all the so-called "blunders" (the looting, troop commitment inadequate to impose order, etc.) were in fact expressions of secret policy. Ditto for allowing Osama bin Laden to escape. Bush wants global theocracy -- whether Islamic or Christian doesn't matter -- to brain-police the New World Order: a tiny, omnipotent, mercilessly savage oligarchy growing ever more obscenely rich off the increasingly enslaved labor of all the rest of us.

[stillcool]

11. Just like our government supported the Taliban...

i think that the intention is for enough stability to extract oil and control the flow. And, when these guys came into office after years of haggling with various tribal leaders along various proposed pipeline routes they said 'F it', blow it up.

[Erika]

12. Agreed. Religion keeps people in line

and subservient. It is interesting to note that the Bush's and the House of Saud, have been doing business together for decades. With Bush's imperialism on Iraq and placement of a puppet head, corporatism will thrive as the working class becomes corporate slaves, thankful for crumbs. Bushbots will be first in line for the crumbs.

The rest of us will remember the lessons of Dickens, Hugo, and Zola.
And act.

[belle]

13. Nah, they don't want an Islamic theocracy--not if it means they won't

sell us their oil, they don't. and it may very well do, if they're righteously pissed off enough.

honestly i don't think Bush knew *what* he wanted. I don't think most of them had the faintest clue how this was going to work. they're like little kids playing games. now the game's not going the way they wanted, and they're getting tired and bored and want to go in to lunch and maybe watch some TV.

[reprobate]

18. Oh, Bush knew what he wanted. But no clue what would happen.

Most of US knew what would happen as soon as the invasion was planned. We knew and predicted civil war in Iraq, and that's exactly what has happened.

You see, the danger with ideologs is that they have grandiose goals, but not enough contact with reality to follow paths of likely outcomes. They seem to live in their own reality, completely separate from the rest of the world. But then that's Mad George.

[Kurovski]

15. I tend to agree. A theocracy in Saudi Arabia has done

wonders for BushCo's profits in the past. They're just following a successful business plan.

Remember when George said he'd run the White House like a business?
Well, It's one of the rare truths the little weasel spoke.

[Usrename]

17. Blowing up the UN headquarters, the International Red Cross

There's no way this is incompetance. They need this war. Without it, they are nothing.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

21. To which "they" are you referring?

[Usrename]

27. The Evil Empire, the Cabal, the Junta, the White House

Sorry, I see that last post was cryptic. I was devastated when those bombings took place within a couple weeks of each other. Those installations were totally undefended. We just let them get bombed. I mean after all the looting, it was suddenly Viet Nam all over again. No one will ever convince me that they didn't know what they were doing. That it was incompetence. Leaving those installations unguarded in an active combat zone was clearly, without question, giving aid to our enemy.

So the White House is treasonous (on so many levels) and they are now more of a danger to America than any other threat, real or imagined.

[Eloriel]

19. That would certainly fit the Straussian (&PNAC) philosophy as well

which holds that religion is really a wonderful thing for the masses -- keeps them obedient, "moral," distracted, etc.

[newswolf56]

23. Here is more evidence that suggests the Bush agenda in the Middle East...

is a global, foreign-policy extension of the Grover Norquist scheme to build a Christian/Muslim alliance on the basis of mutual fundamentalist hatreds: of women, gays, "abominations," liberty itself. This is not tinfoil-hat dementia; here are three links:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010514/dreyfuss

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=1...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,...

(Note that one of these links is to a Rightist site: even the secular conservatives are terrified by the implications of the Norquist scheme.)

[newswolf56]

24. For some reason the two bottom links failed to copy. Here they are...

again:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=11209

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1398055,00.html

[Cocoa]

14. let the sliming begin

this lady is gonna get Rove'd.

[NNN0LHI]

20. The Repubs will be describing her as a terrorist sympathizer by morning n/t

[tiptoe]

16. "Whatever! Sharia Schmoria..as long as our oil ain't messed with," Bush.

[doublethink]

22. Here another pic of her ..... at * State of The Union Address ....

[IndianaGreen]

25. American troops died to force Iraqi women to wear the veil

Thank you America, for screwing up women's rights once again. You did it in Afghanistan when you supported Islamic radicals against the Soviet-backed Marxist government, you did it again in Afghanistan when you let your boy Karzai establish a Ministry of Morals headed by an Islamic fanatic that is imposing restrictions on women as onerous as the ones the Taliban had.

Iraqi women enjoyed a degree of freedom unheard of in the region. Our dirty little war of aggression will take the gains women had made under the Baathists, and subject them to religious oppression.

Thanks for nothing, America!

[alcibiades_mystery]

26. Iraqi women had more rights in 1980 than they will under Shiite rule

Fact.

[Usrename]

28. Hell, they were having elections in Kurdistan

[daleo]

29. She got played by the BFEE.

Now she will be tossed aside by the Bush propaganda machine like a used kleenex.

[Strelnikov_]

30. When You Lay Down With Dogs . . .