Voice from the Commonwealth Commentary, World Views and Occasional Rants from a small 'l' libertarian in Massachussetts
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
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Praise for Voice
"A smart fellow...I do like, recommend and learn from Barbera's blog." -Roger L. Simon
"Your blog is bullshit"- anonymous angry French reader.
A look at one of Saddam's more Stalinist policies.
When Saddam Hussein's men came for them, Omar Osman Siddiq and his family went quietly. With his wife and eight children, Siddiq silently loaded the family's possessions onto a truck waiting to carry them away from the home in Kirkuk, a city rich in oil, where his forebears had lived for generations.
Then, at a police station, Siddiq surrendered all the personal documents Iraqis need for daily existence, including identity cards, a booklet for weekly food rations, even the registration for the family car.
Flanked by armed guards, he faced one last indignity, signing a paper attesting that everything had been in accordance with law, and voluntary.
By nightfall, the truck reached its final destination: a plot of ground in the arid desert 130 kilometers (80 miles) east of Kirkuk, just outside the 90 percent of Iraq that is governed by Saddam and inside a self-governing Kurdish enclave that leads a precarious existence under Western air protection. To finance their new life as refugees at Barda Qaraman, the Siddiqs had savings of $30.
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