Pages: 1 2 >>
Lieberman And The Palestinian “demographic threat”
Link: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article16227.htm
Lieberman And The Palestinian “demographic threat”
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
01/19/07 "Information Clearing House" -- -- When I published my book Blood and Religion last year, I sought not only to explain what lay behind Israeli policies since the failed Camp David negotiations nearly seven years ago, including the disengagement from Gaza and the building of a wall across the West Bank, but I also offered a few suggestions about where Israel might head next.
ED NOTE: An excellent overview of Israeli politics as issues of demographics and physical separation dominate the Israeli internal debate. That this is a policy of functional apartheid is hard to deny when Binyamin Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel can state that the child allowance cuts he imposed as finance minister in 2002 had had a “positive” demographic effect by reducing the birth rate of Palestinian citizens. Read on.
Kurdish Iraqi soldiers deserting to avoid the conflict in Baghdad
Kurdish Iraqi soldiers are deserting to avoid the conflict in Baghdad
By Leila Fadel and Yaseen Taha
McClatchy Newspapers
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq - As the Iraqi government attempts to secure a capital city ravaged by conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslim Arabs, its decision to bring a third party into the mix may cause more problems than peace.
Kurdish soldiers from northern Iraq, who are mostly Sunnis but not Arabs, are deserting the army to avoid the civil war in Baghdad, a conflict they consider someone else's problem.
ED NOTE: A beginning to the end game in Iraq.
History of Israel's Nuclear Arsenal
Link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CAR20070115&articleId=4477
Israel’s plans to Wage Nuclear War on Iran: History of Israel's Nuclear Arsenal
by Michael Carmichael
Global Research, January 15, 2007
In 1986, an Israeli civil servant who worked in the state-owned nuclear industry flew to London where he was invited to meet with reporters working for The Sunday Times. In these press briefings, Mordechai Vanunu revealed Israel’s top secret - the Israelis had gained control of a growing stockpile of nuclear warheads.
Iraq's Young Blood: The Next Jihadists
Link: http://www.iraq-war.ru/article/115275
Iraq's Young Blood: The Next Jihadists
By: Christian Caryl
Jan. 22, 2007 issue - Ammar will tell you he's proud to be carrying a gun. His father was a brigadier in Saddam Hussein's Army, a man who saw combat in his country's several wars, and from an early age Ammar had accompanied him to the shooting range. "I got used to the sound of guns then," Ammar says. So he was ready, last fall, when the imam in his Baghdad neighborhood urged residents to take up arms against the invader—who in this case happened to be members of a Shiite militia trying to push into the predominantly Sunni area. Ammar joined the neighborhood watch, a ragtag bunch of men who stand guard nightly at improvised roadblocks and rooftop observation posts. In mid-October Ammar fought his first big battle against soldiers from the Mahdi Army—"the garbage collectors and robbers," as he contemptuously refers to the Shiite militia. He says he put his Kalashnikov assault rifle to good use: "I think I injured or even killed two of them. Our group killed more than six of them that night."
DU Scandal Explodes -Horrendous US Casualties
DU Scandal Explodes -
Horrendous US Casualties
FreeMarketNews.com
The Preventive Psychiatry Newsletter has written to its subscribers telling them that the real reason the former Veterans Affairs Secretary, Anthony Principi, recently resigned was because he has been involved in a massive scandal covering up the fact that Gulf War Syndrome was caused by the use of depleted uranium, according to the SF Bay View.
The Fall of the Warrior King
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/magazine/23sassaman.html?pagewanted=print
October 23, 2005
The Fall of the Warrior King
By DEXTER FILKINS NY Times
The body had not yet turned up. Indeed, at that point, early in January 2004, it wasn't clear there was a body at all. Months later, at the trial, the lawyers would still be arguing about it, the puffy, wrinkled corpse that was finally found floating face down in an irrigation canal off the Tigris. But even then, even before the dead man surfaced, it was clear that something had gone wrong on that cold Iraqi night down by the river, something wild by the American military's standards of discipline and force, and the problem had wended its way up the chain of command to the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman.
ED NOTE: War consumes everything, even its own. All is grey as the landscape merges into the obscuring moral fog. This is the story of an excellent officer and his downfall. To long to post here I attach the beginning of this piece and refer you to the original.
A soldier's story: The short life and violent death of Sgt Chris Hickey
Link: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article321649.ece
A soldier's story: The short life and violent death of Sgt Chris Hickey, 1st Battalion, the Coldstream Guards
His death on Tuesday got only fleeting mentions. So Severin Carrell went in search of the man who was the 97th Briton to fall in Iraq, and found friends asking: how many more of our lads are going to die like this?
Published: 23 October 2005 The Independant
Life was looking up for Christopher Hickey. He had a job he loved, and family and friends who loved him. He was due to come home to Britain tomorrow after his second tour of duty with the Coldstream Guards in Iraq.
ED NOTE: And in the end, beyond the grand design, the politics and retoric; beyond race, creed, and nation; this is where war always ends. Another missing life. A very balanced and well writen piece.
Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration
Link: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/082405Z.shtml
Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Report
Wednesday 24 August 2005
I had been hesitant to speak out before because this Administration is so vindictive. But now I will ... Anybody who confronts this Administration or Rumsfeld or the Pentagon with a true assessment, they find themselves either out of a job, out of their positions, fired, relieved or chastised. Their career comes to an end.
-- Janis Karpinski, interview with Marjorie Cohn, August 3, 2005
ED NOTE: Brig. Gen. Janis Kkarpinski (Ret) is the only senior officer disiplined over the Abu Griab tortures. This is her first ever full length interview. Well worth the read.
Germany In 1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism
Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5775.htm
Germany In 1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism
by Bernard Weiner
June : 2003: If my email is any indication, a goodly number of folks wonder if they're living in America in 2003 or Germany in 1933.
All this emphasis on nationalism, the militarization of society, identifying The Leader as the nation, a constant state of fear and anxiety heightened by the authorities, repressive laws that shred constitutional guarantees of due process, wars of aggression launched on weaker nations, the desire to assume global hegemony, the merging of corporate and governmental interests, vast mass-media propaganda campaigns, a populace that tends to believe the slogans and lies it's fed without asking too many questions, a timid opposition that barely contests the administration's reckless adventurism abroad and police-state policies at home, etc. etc.
How can the US ever win, when Iraqi children die like this?
Link: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22336&mode=nested&order=0
Robert Fisk: 'How can the US ever win, when Iraqi children die like this?'
By Robert Fisk, The Independent
There's the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans - if you are lucky.
ER NOTE: Please Read.
Talking Wounded
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/09/AR2005080901441_pf.html
Talking Wounded
Terry Rodgers Came Back From Iraq a Changed Man, and Not Just Because of the Bomb
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 10, 2005; C01
"So we're driving down the road and it's midnight, so it's pitch-black, and when you're driving at
night, you don't use any lights," says Terry Rodgers, "but we can see fine because we've got night vision goggles."
He's sitting in the living room of his mother's townhouse in Gaithersburg, telling the story of his last night in Iraq. He's still got his Army crew cut and he's wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on the chest.
ED NOTE: A soldiers tale.
Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs
Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs
Interrogated General's Sleeping-Bag Death, CIA's Use of Secret Iraqi Squad Are Among Details
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
08/03/05 "Washington Post" -- -- Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.
The victim and the killer
The victim and the killer
Yasser Salihee was an Iraqi journalist. Joe was an American sniper. On June 24, 2005, fate brought them together on a Baghdad street.
By Phillip Robertson
July 27, 2005 "Salon.com" -- -- BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In the Sunni neighborhood of Amariyah in west Baghdad on June 24, a 33-year-old Iraqi man named Yasser Salihee was driving alone as he approached a small number of soldiers from a mixed U.S. and Iraqi patrol. Salihee was driving west. It was midday and most of the soldiers in the patrol had just entered a four-story building on the south side of the street to search for suspected insurgents on the roof. A few stayed down on the street to provide security. On the north side of the street stood two U.S. snipers; across the street an American from the same unit and at least one Iraqi soldier were posted. The street was left open to traffic: The patrol had not blocked off the street with cones and concertina wire, as they normally would for a cordon and search operation. The soldiers decided to stop cars by standing in the street and aiming their rifles at the drivers.
ED NOTE: A few seconds and another civilian death in Iraq. This account is balanced and bare. The simple truth. Must read.
Shots to the heart of Iraq
Shots to the heart of Iraq: Innocent civilians are increasingly being killed by U.S. troops
Innocent civilians, including people who are considered vital to building democracy, are increasingly being killed by U.S. troops.
By Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD — Three men in an unmarked sedan pulled up near the headquarters of the national police major crimes unit. The two passengers, wearing traditional Arab dishdasha gowns, stepped from the car.
At the same moment, a U.S. military convoy emerged from an underpass. Apparently believing the men were staging an ambush, the Americans fired, killing one passenger and wounding the other. The sedan's driver was hit in the head by two bullet fragments.
The soldiers drove on without stopping.
So, Mr Bremer, where did all the money go?
Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9401.htm
So, Mr Bremer, where did all the money go?
The extraordinary scandal of Iraq's missing billions
At the end of the Iraq war, vast sums of money were made available to the US-led provisional authorities, headed by Paul Bremer, to spend on rebuilding the country. By the time Bremer left the post eight months later, $8.8bn of that money had disappeared.
By Ed Harriman
07/07/05 "The Guardian" - - When Paul Bremer, the American pro consul in Baghdad until June last year, arrived in Iraq soon after the official end of hostilities, there was $6bn left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and at least $10bn from resumed Iraqi oil exports. Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 2003, all these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and intended to be spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) "in a transparent manner ... for the benefit of the Iraqi people".
ED NOTE: Again, The Gaurdian prints what the US press will not. Where did all the money go?
United States exports of biological materials to Iraq:
Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9390.htm
United States exports of biological materials to Iraq:
Compromising the credibility of international law
Geoffrey Holland
University of Sussex
ED NOTE: Please see the link for the full report of Mr Rumsfeld's bussiness doings in the 80`s
Abstract
This paper argues that the United States breached the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) by supplying warfare-related biological materials to Iraq during the 1980s, at a time when that nation was at war with its neighbour, Iran. It is further argued that the United Kingdom has an obligation, not least due to its published policy on the issue, to formally report this breach to the United Nations Security Council. The case is made that if the UK, as a State Party to the BTWC, will not report this matter, then the Convention is not the legally binding international instrument it is claimed to be, thus compromising the credibility of international law. It may come as some surprise to the reader to learn – and as far as the author is aware this information has not previously been made public – that the anthrax threat from Iraq, a repeatedly cited reason for the 2003 invasion of that country, actually originated from a dead cow in South Oxfordshire.
The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm
Link: http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.html
ED NOTE: This Time/Life photo essay is almost ten years old... and still current. Very much worth viewing the original link.
When our soldiers risked their lives in the Gulf, they never imagined that their children might suffer the consequences--or that their country would turn its back on them.
Photography by Derek Hudson Text by Kenneth Miller Reporting by Jimmie Briggs
Jayce Hanson's birth defects may stem from his father's Gulf War service. But like hundreds of other families, the Hansons face official stonewalling--and a frightening future.
The perils of colonial justice in Iraq
Link: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GG06Ak02.html
The perils of colonial justice in Iraq
By Ashraf Fahim
Among its more vociferous opponents, the American project in Iraq is characterized as a classic colonial adventure, indistinguishable in nature or intent from the deepest, darkest chapters in Northern oppression of the South: America is to Iraq as Britain was to India or Belgium to the Congo. Proponents, on the other hand, argue the inherent benevolence of American empire - the export of democracy and egalitarianism in contrast to the transparent racist imperialism of yore.
ED NOTE: Essential reading from The Asia Times
What the Military really Costs
Link: http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
Ed Note: Please do visitthe link for the full graphical layout on governmental spending. What you see below is the budget in a nutshell.
Current Military
$558B:Military Personnel $109B, Operation and Maintenance $154B, Procurement $81B, Research and Development $68B, Construction $7B, Family Housing $4B, Retired Pay $46B, DoE Nuclear Weapons $17B, NASA (50%) $8B, International Security $8B, Homeland Sec. (50%) $16B, Ex. Off. Pres. $78, Misc. $4B, “Allowance for Anticipated Supplemental” (Iraq) $25B
UNBUDGETTED MILITARY: $85B (est.):Most of the spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is not included in the President’s Budget but the Administration has announced it will seek this money as supplemental appropriations later in year as it has in the past two years
Past Military, $384B: Veterans’ Benefits $70B; Interest on National Debt (80% estimated to be created by military spending) $314B
Human Resources, $722B: Education, Health/Human Services, HUD, Food/Nutrition programs, Labor Department, Soc. Sec. Admin.
General Government, $261B: Legislative, Justice, State Dept., International Affairs, Treasury, Gov’t. Personnel, 20% interest on national debt, NASA (50%), Homeland Security (25%)
Physical Resources, $120B: Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Interior, Transportation, Environmental Protection, Army Corps Engineers, NSF, FCC, Homeland Security (25%)
Death By Slow Burn
2005-05-18 06:00:58 , in WAR Link: http://www.iraq-war.ru/article/50492
Death By Slow Burn
By: Amy Worthington on: 18.05.2005
How America Nukes Its Own Troops
What 'Support Our Troops' Really Means
By Amy Worthington - The Idaho Observer
On March 30, an AP photo featured an American pro-war activist holding a sign: "Nuke the evil scum, it worked in 1945!" That's exactly what George Bush has done. America's mega-billion dollar war in Iraq has been indeed a NUCLEAR WAR.
:: Next >>
