For the second year in a row, here's my alternative State of the Union: a look back at 18 stories that mattered most in 2006.1. In January, the radical Islamic group Hamas won a surprising 76 of 132 seats in Palestine's parliamentary elections, unseating the Fatah Party. On April 17th, Hamas said a suicide bomb attack in Tel Aviv, which killed nine, was justified. In June, it was reported that an Israeli artillery shell killed at least seven civilians who were picnicking on a beach in Gaza. Hamas subsequently declared that it would no longer abide by a 16-month-old cease-fire and fired a rocket into Israel. After the abduction of an Israeli soldier in July, Israel bombed Gaza's main power plant, two bridges, and the offices of Palestine's prime minister and interior minister.
2. In February, conservative Samuel Alito was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, replacing Sandra Day O’Connor.3. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court voted to refuse Puerto Ricans the right to vote in U.S. Presidential elections.
4. In March, the Basque separatist group ETA declared a permanent ceasefire. They broke that ceasefire on December 30 with a car bomb attack at Barajas International Airport in Madrid that killed two Ecuadorian immigrants.[3][4]
5. Also on December 30th, Saddam Hussein was hanged.
6. In April, The Massachusetts legislature voted to make health insurance mandatory for all state residents by July 2007.
7. Also in April, the United States announced that it would free 141 of the 490 inmates then being held at Guantanomo. As of November 2006, only 55 of these detainees had been freed. Of the remaining 435, 110 have been labeled as "ready for release. " Of the other 325, "more than 70" will face trial, according to the Pentagon. That leaves about 250 who may be held indefinitely.[6] In a related story, it was reported in June that the Pentagon has decided to remove a reference to Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions-- the one that bans torture and cruel treatment as well as
"outrages on personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment"--from a new edition of the Army Field Manual on interrogation. And in October, Bush signed the Military Commissions Act sent to him by Congress, which suspends the right of habeas corpus for terrorism suspects and grants immunity to CIA interrogators and government officials, such as President Bush, for violations of the War Crimes Act. [NYT][Chicago Sun-Times] A United Nations official claimed that the United States has become a role model for prisoner-abusing governments around the world.[Washington Post]8. By the end of May, the International Rescue Committee estimated that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since conflict began in the Congo in 1998, making it the world’s most lethal conflict since World War II.
9. In June, an Islamic militia took over Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, routing U.S.-backed warlords. On December 25th, Ethiopia (with tacit support from the U.S.) declared war on the insurgent Islamist militia.[9] The photo at left shows Islamic militia casualties in Somalia (it has been reported that 1,000 were killed).10. In July, the world-trade talks known as the Doha round broke down over agriculture policies because the EU won’t give up their agricultural tariffs and the U.S. won’t cut back its farm subsidies. Bad news for West African farmers.
11. A September article published by the official UN News Service states that " over 400,000 people have lost their lives and some 2 million more have been driven from their homes"[77] since armed conflict began in the Darfur region of Sudan in July of 2003. Last January, the working U.N. estimate of deaths in Darfur was 180,000.
12. In July, war erupted between Hezbollah and Israel after the Lebanese militia crossed the Israeli border and captured two Israeli soldiers. Israel countered by bombing Lebanese roads, bridges, power stations, fuel depots, ports, and airports, killing numerous civilians. Hezbollah guerillas fired several hundred rockets into towns in northern Israel and Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah (that's Nasrallah in the photo at right) boasted that his forces were inflicting "maximum casualties.” Eventually, Hezbollah accepted a U.N. ceasefire resolution, agreed to allow Lebanese and U.N. troops to serve as peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, and declared victory in the 34-day war. In October, Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon, and in December one million Hezbollah supporters rallied for the ouster of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora.
13. Felipe Calderon, candidate of the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party, was apparently elected president of Mexico in July, though Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist mayor of Mexico City, refused to concede (that's Calderon on the left in the photo at right and Obrador on the right). In December, "donnybrooks and yelling matches" preceded Calderon’s four-minute swearing-in ceremony.14. In October, North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb.[BBC News]
15. In the November mid-term elections in the U.S., six incumbent Republican senators were defeated and the Republican Party lost its majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, giving Democrats control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1995.
16. Following the midterms, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned, and to replace him President Bush nominated Robert Gates, a member of the Iraq Study Group and former head of the CIA, who was investigated in 1991 by the office of the independent counsel for his role in the Iran-contra scandal, and was suspected to have passed military intelligence to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.17. On November 23, two hundred fifteen people were killed in a massive bombing and mortar attack on a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, marking Iraq's largest single-day death toll since the U.S. invasion. The killings prompted Shiite militiamen to seize and burn alive as many as twenty-four Sunnis. As of January 9, 2007, 3,018 U.S. Armed Forces have died in Iraq since 2003; 806 of these U.S. soldiers died in 2006 (as opposed to 904 in 2005 and 958 in 2004). Meanwhile, The United Nations reported that 34,452 violent civilian deaths occurred in Iraq 2006, based on data from morgues, hospitals, and municipal authorities across Iraq.[3] By comparison, the Iraq Body Count Project gives totals of 24,500 civilian deaths in 2006, [4] and 55,000 since the U.S. invasion of 2003,
while the Lancet survey of mortality forwards a much higher total of approximately 370,000 deaths in 2006, [5] and 655,000 total excess deaths in Iraq from the U.S. invasion in 2003 until the summer of 2006. The Lancet study's figure of 655,000 is based on surveys and sampling methods and includes those due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc. [2] The Iraq Body Count (IBC) project's figure includes civilian deaths due to insurgent/military action and increased criminal violence, but the IBC warns that the figure is low since "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media." [1] 18. Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), and Augusto Pinochet, author of the deaths of 3,000 Chilean dissidents and the torture of 30,000 more, died.
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