December 7, 2003 journal, Rembrandt on CBS Sunday Morning, give us some freedom,

Iraqi freedom if you will, the utopia they talk about but never have produced here or there being a political come on to excuse the wholesale killing of innocent people them and us.

CBS 60 Minutes ran an article in detail explaining how the American troops are handling the re-establishing of Iraq with iron hands and putting Saddams people back in power. I will quote the article as they have posted on the Internet. The so-called coalition is no longer mentioned. It is the American taxpayer only footing the bill for rebuilding of Iraq.

"60 Minutes-Operation Iraqi Freedom, December 7, 2003, 'Iraqi’s Denied Freedoms'.

When the U.S. invasion came last spring with promises of democracy and self rule, people in Karbala were among the first to try and take charge of their own affairs. The "(Baathist) system must be removed from management. We don't need them, the Americans have exempted some Baathists. This is not right". Sheik Abdul Mehdi. Religious & community leaders got together and selected a city council to represent them, and a security force to protect them. They had assumed that their experiment in democracy would be applauded by the American military. It was not. U.S. troops disarmed the protection force, arrested popular City Councilmen and put back into power some of the same people who had served Saddam. It has left people here angry and frustrated, including Doctor Hussain Shahristani, one of the most respected exiles to return after the war. The last time 60 min. spoke with him was in London just before the war. He was one of the Iraq's leading dissidents, a top nuclear scientist who had refused to help Saddam build a nuclear bomb. At that time, he told correspondent Steve Kroft about his 11 years in solitary confinement and torture at the hands of Saddam's henchman. "They used high-voltage probes on the sensitive part of the body," says Shahristani, who recalled seeing and hearing other people being tortured as well. "The worst part of it was hearing these young children screaming". Shahristani escaped in 1991 and devoted a decade to helping Iraq refugees. And when U.S. forces rolled into Southern Iraq, he followed, setting up an aid organization in Karbala, distributing everything from shoes to wheelbarrows and supplying milk and eggs to 7000 families. When Shahristani talked to 60 minutes in London earlier this year, he said his main concern was that the U.S. would rush into war without doing its homework properly". "They have conducted the war itself very well", he says. "But they were not prepared for what the Iraqi people expected of them after the war". What they expected, Shahristani said, is just what the U.S. had promised, self-rule & swift justice for members of Saddam's Baath party. Who had enslaved them for more than 20 years. "The expect-ations were that the Baathist would be immediately arrested & put on trial for their crimes against humanity, for their crimes against the Iraqi people. Now this hasn't happened and people are alarmed when the Baathist were actually reinstated back into government," he says, citing that a lot of ex-Baathist still hold positions in the police department. When U.S. Marines pulled into town, their American commanders decided to install as police chief General Abbas Fathil Abud, a high-ranking member of the Baath Party, who had served Saddam for 24 years. When 60 minutes arrived at his office, he was closeted with U.S. military officers and protected by American troops. "There is a lot of cooperation between us and the American military police" says general Abud. Eventhough Ambassador Paul Bremer is on record saying that no high-ranking member of Saddams old Baath Party will hold power in Iraq, in Karbala, the U.S.government is cooperating with General Abud and has put him in charge of a well armed force-even though he is a Baath party member”.