Cantwell joining senators in Iraq
Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said Tuesday she will travel to Iraq with three other senators to serve as an official election observer.
Cantwell will meet with Washington state troops, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, U.S. military officers and high-ranking Iraqi officials during the three-day visit.
She was to depart late Tuesday for Iraq aboard a military aircraft from Andrews Air Force Base, accompanied by Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.
The delegation will visit several polling places Thursday, the final day of voting as Iraq elects a new parliament.
In a statement before leaving, Cantwell said she was one of 79 senators calling for 2006 to be “a year of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty,” with Iraqi forces taking the lead for the security of a free and sovereign Iraq. “The elections in Iraq are an important act of democracy and an initial milestone for independence,” she said, adding that President Bush and Congress must do a better job “making sure that troops are trained, infrastructure is secured and the international community is engaged to help the new government that emerges on Thursday stand on its own two feet.”
Ear amputee has reason to smile again
London Khalid Jameel, a 33-year-old Iraqi taxi driver, couldn’t stop smiling Tuesday. For the first time since 1994, he had a right ear.
Jameel said he, like hundreds of other Iraqis, had his ear sliced off as a painful and humiliating punishment for challenging the government of Saddam Hussein. But on Dec. 3, a British plastic surgeon and other doctors built a new ear with cartilage from his rib and tissue from his scalp, as part of a new campaign by British and Iraqi doctors to erase one of the most brutal reminders of the ruthlessness of that era.
“I have such gratitude,” he said, for the reconstruction of his ear. “A smile is back on my face.”
Suad Al-Saffar, an Iraqi doctor who works for the Denmark-based International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, said there were more than 400 victims of ear amputation in Basra and estimated that there may be as many as 1,600 throughout Iraq. Other human rights groups have put the number higher. The new efforts to erase those scars is a way to help ordinary Iraqis, and the country, move forward, Al-Saffar said.