I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed 
the pain and bloodshed of too many innocents

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. 
There has been a lot of talk about the action and about 
the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, 
and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: 
what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, 
and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting 
it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by 
the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more 
than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of 
thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and 
outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the 
Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the 
Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni 
in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian 
the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared 
hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the 
oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother, 
neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.

I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. 
It humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my 
Baghdad burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures 
remained in my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. 
The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, 
Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our 
wounded land. I travelled through my burning land and saw with my 
own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the 
screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame 
haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily 
tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined 
Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my 
teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that 
has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every 
scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the 
sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken 
homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it 
had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that 
shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, 
I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of 
my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection 
of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its 
infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the 
professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. 
All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the 
feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. 
The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the 
occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of 
patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then 
professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material 
gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

• Singularity Timeline
  2008 -- MindForth
  2009 -- AI Landrush
  . 2010 -- Human-Level AI
  . . . 2011 -- Cybernetic Economy
  . . . . . . 2012 -- Superintelligent AI
  . . . . . . . . . . 2012 -- Joint Stewardship of Earth
  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2012 -- Technological Singularity . . . . . . . . . . . .
  

• Shortcuts to Mind
  
  • Simulating massive paralellism (maspar) with serial-execution software;
  • Limiting the robot sensorium to audition as the initially available sense;
  • Hardcoding initial English vocabulary and simple Chomskyan syntax;
  • Accepting written English words instead of English speech phonemes;
  • Treating short-term-memory (STM) as if it were long-term-memory (LTM);
  • Making the AI rejuvenate itself for lack of a lifelong memory capacity;
  • Searching for associations instead of activating a direct-access tag;
  • Relying upon most-recent recall instead of maspar redundancy.

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