| Old Articles | | Sunday, August 31 | | · | Needed: An Inquiry Into A Slaughter |
| Wednesday, August 20 | | · | The UN bombing: a product of the US occupation of Iraq |
| · | Bush's Crumbling Authority in Iraq |
| Thursday, July 24 | | · | U.S. media misleading public on Iraq casualties |
| Friday, May 16 | | · | Government by criminals |
| Saturday, May 10 | | · | Don't Lift The Sanctions Yet |
| Monday, April 28 | | · | US military bases: The spoils and deceptions of war |
| Monday, April 21 | | · | Shi'a will to power: Downfall of Bush and the Neocons? |
| Tuesday, April 15 | | · | The destruction of Iraq is good for business |
| Monday, April 14 | | · | Cheering crowds don't make an unjust war right |
| Saturday, April 12 | | · | Chaos, or just a little vase they're going through? |
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Invasion of Iraq: U.S. Troops Told To Return Fire Even When Civilians Present
Friday, August 13 @ 09:21:46 UTC |  By Sherwood Ross
August 13, 2010
Three former U.S. soldiers involved in the infamous “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunship attack on Baghdad civilians in July 2007, say that attack was nothing out of the ordinary. The massacre---that killed more than a dozen Iraqis, two of them employed by Reuters News Service---ignited a wave of international revulsion against the U.S. military when a video of the massacre was released by WikiLeaks last April.
“What the world did not see is the months of training that led up to the incident, in which soldiers were taught to respond to threats with a barrage of fire---a “wall of steel,” in Army parlance---even if it put civilians at risk,” report Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey in the August 16th issue of The Nation magazine.
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Invasion of Iraq: The Iraq War Is Over. It Is The Moment for Democrats To Show Real Leadership
Monday, April 30 @ 17:48:03 UTC | If President Bush's Veto Is Not Challenged Tomorrow, Thousands of Iraqis and Hundreds of US Troops Are Certain to Perish
by Gary Younge, The Guardian/UK
April 30, 2007
There is no overestimating the popular reverence Americans have for their men and women in uniform. A direct translation of "squaddie", a term steeped in class contempt which betrays as much antipathy and ambivalence as it does admiration in the UK, simply does not exist in the US. Fighting for your country is generally regarded as the ultimate form of public service.
Flight attendants will announce the presence of an active service man or woman to cheers from the rest of the plane. At anti-war demonstrations, protesters wave banners proclaiming "Support the troops, oppose the war." The nation may be irrevocably split on the moral value of any war, but when it comes to backing the people who are executing it, they speak as one.
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Invasion of Iraq: I Will Not Be Forced Out by US and UK, Says Iraqi PM
Wednesday, April 05 @ 22:20:32 UTC | Leader's first interview since Rice and Straw's move to break deadlock
by Jonathan Steele, Guardian/UK
Iraq's embattled prime minister has defiantly refused to give up his claim to head the country's next government in spite of strong American and British pleas for an end to a deadlock which has paralysed the country for almost four months.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian in Baghdad - his first since Condoleezza Rice and Jack Straw pleaded with him and his rivals for an immediate agreement to prevent a slide to civil war - Ibrahim Jaafari insisted he would continue to carry out his duties.
"I heard their points of view even though I disagree with them," he said, referring to Ms Rice and Mr Straw's hectic arm-twisting visit to the Iraqi capital which ended on Monday.
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Invasion of Iraq: Iraqis are no fools and neither are we
Wednesday, March 15 @ 07:59:50 UTC | by qrswave
As we watch Iraq descend into chaos this week, given the facts and the circumstances, it is impossible to ignore that there is more to this massacre than meets the eye.
Police in the past 24 hours have found the bodies of at least 87 men killed by execution style shootings in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian killing, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday. They include at least 29 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shiite neighborhood. The operative word here is apparent.
Acting on an anonymous tip, police found a 6-by-8-meter (yard) hole in a empty field. It contained at least 29 dead men most of them in their underwear in Kamaliyah, a mostly Shiite east Baghdad suburb. Why remain anonymous? If an innocent bystander from the neighborhood, someone beyond suspicion, had found these bodies after the fact, why would they insist on remaining anonymous?
And the neighborhood was mostly Shiite, but what about the men killed? Were they all Shiite? Or were some victims Sunni?
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Invasion of Iraq: Iraq 'Handover' - Well, That Went Well ...
Thursday, July 01 @ 00:26:04 UTC | by Felicity Arbuthnot
June 30, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
That went well then. An illegal invasion and occupation, destruction of an entire civil society, murder, mayhem, chaos, torture, numerous 'disappeared' and an Administration - backed by an army wielding the most shocking and awesome weapons on earth - cowering in their 'Dream Zone' as the Iraqis have renamed it - too terrified to even walk the streets for fifteen months.
Given all, it was inevitable that the much vaunted hand over to the 'sovereign' Iraqi government was a furtive, hole in the corner affair, brought forward by two days, in case the 'insurgents' had planned to mark the day with a political human sacrifice or two. Then, like a thief in the night, America's top 'Terrorist Czar', Kissinger Associate's Viceroy Bremer - whose directives from his isolated squat in Saddam's foremost palace poured fuel on the fire of resistance at every ill conceived move - showed the heels of his ridiculous desert boots and fled for Baghdad Airport, protected by a phalanx of goons in shades and heavy metal jackets. Bremer's boots trod neither Iraq's extraordinary desert, nor Mesopotamia's haunting prehistory archeological sites: Babylon, Qurna - site of the Garden of Eden - the Roman city of Hatra, or even Ur, believed Abraham's birthplace, genesis of Islam, Judaism and the Christianity the US Administration so espouses and in the name of which Bush launched his ill fated 'Crusade'.
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Invasion of Iraq: Social imperialists and Brahimi's back-seat driver
Friday, June 11 @ 00:40:01 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is putting together a plan for a transitional Iraqi government that will take the reins from the Coalition Provisional Authority on June 30th, and will hand them over to an elected government in January. At least, the official line has Brahimi in the driver's seat.
But most times Brahimi's name pops up, so does Robert D. Blackwill's. He's Condoleeza Rice's chief deputy for Iraq.
Blackwill, according to the April 16th New York Times, "has been working side by side with Mr. Brahimi in Iraq," which kind of makes you wonder whether Blackwill's the designated back-seat driver, telling Brahimi which route to take and where to turn. That would make the UN plan American, and Brahimi a front.
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Invasion of Iraq: Abu Hamza al-Masri: Made in the USA
Sunday, May 30 @ 01:38:06 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, www.kurtnimmo.com
It is a bit of historical data rarely quoted by Fox News or CNN as they clank out soundbite-sized backgrounders on terrorism: Many of America's Islamic enemies were custom-made to order by the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate) in Afghanistan.
Abu Hamza al-Masri is no exception.
"In an 11-count indictment unsealed in New York on Thursday, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Mr. Masri faced charges of hostage-taking and conspiracy in connection with an attack in Yemen in 1998 on 16 tourists, including two Americans. Four hostages -- three Britons and one Australian -- were killed and several others were wounded when the Yemeni Army tried to rescue them," reports the New York Times.
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Invasion of Iraq: US Policy and the Kurdish Nation
Friday, February 06 @ 20:42:23 UTC | By RON JACOBS
If one recalls the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US and UK, they will remember the Turkish legislature's refusal to allow US ground troops to use Turkish territory as a staging area. The reasoning behind this vote was twofold. Not only did the vote represent the way the Turkish people felt about the impending war, it also served the strategic needs of Turkey, in that it made it more difficult for the US military to seize and control the massive Kirkuk oilfields.
As it turned out, it was the Kurdish forces that ended up in control. This is a mixed blessing for the Turks. On the one hand, the Turkish military has military superiority over the Kurdish forces, thanks to the largesse of the US defense industry, yet at the same time, the Turkish government's mortal enemy now have more power than ever before thanks to their military control of the traditionally Kurdish region in northern Iraq. It is this power that makes the Turks nervous, out of a fear that it could be the beginnings of a genuine Kurdish state.
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Invasion of Iraq: Human Rights Groups Denounce Civilian Claims Process as
Sunday, January 25 @ 16:25:34 UTC | WASHINGTON -- Two human rights groups have issued a searing indictment of the U.S. military's system for compensating Iraqi civilians victimized by American troops.
In a joint report released Jan. 10, Occupation Watch and the National Association for Defense of Human Rights in Iraq (NADHRI) accused the U.S. military of ignoring "civilian needs and human rights" by refusing to compensate Iraqi civilians mistakenly injured or killed during combat situations, and concluded that the ineffective nature of the claims process emboldens U.S. troops to act with impunity.
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World Focus: David Kay leaving empty handed
Friday, January 02 @ 01:11:36 UTC | By Matthew Riemer, yellowtimes.org
The man the Bush administration put in charge of finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, David Kay, announced this week that he is stepping down from his post sometime early in 2004. Kay heads the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which is currently scouring Iraq for signs of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The former U.N. weapons inspector cited the duration of the inspections as one of his reasons for leaving; Kay had originally believed that the entire procedure would be completed in six months time, putting the completion date around the first of the year.
When evaluating the post-war inspections process in Iraq and the by now cliché saga of the weapons of mass destruction story, it is instructive to look deeper and ask what other factors may be forcing David Kay to step down as the ISG head.
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Invasion of Iraq: Growing the Dictatorship in Iraq
Friday, December 12 @ 13:18:56 UTC | By KURT NIMMO
Yes, things are going haywire in Iraq -- but we can fix the problem, or so says one of the top slot neocons, Newt Gingrich.
See, according to Newt, the problem is Bush didn't install an Iraqi dictator immediately after the invasion. Instead he sent over Paul Bremer and his crew who took up residence in one of Saddam's palaces.
It looks bad, having all these white boys around calling the shots. Besides, they are really a bunch of screw-ups.
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Invasion of Iraq: Oh The Little Saddams We Weave
Sunday, December 07 @ 03:34:54 UTC | by Jeremy Scahill, CommonDreams.org
There is a despot in Iraq, ruling with an iron fist from the comfort of his luxury palace on the banks of the Tigris River. He oversees a ruthless military force and a web of repressive domestic "intelligence" thugs that have terrorized Iraqis for decades. His name is not Saddam Hussein; it's L. Paul Bremer.
Some like to call Bremer the governor of Iraq, others politely refer to him as the US Administrator. But what he really is is Saddam's successor. This week, as the US death toll in Iraq rose, as more Iraqi (and Iranian) civilians paid the heavy price of the occupation, Bremer had more pressing issues to attend to. He finally got around to fixing up that shabby old palace of his. He paid an Iraqi firm $27,000 to remove 4 larger than life busts of Saddam's head from the palace compound. "I've been looking at these for six months," said Bremer as the first head was being removed, "so I am delighted to see them coming down. We're sick of them."
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Invasion of Iraq: Eyewitness in Iraq:
Thursday, October 30 @ 09:10:50 UTC | By ROBERT FISK, www.counterpunch.org
Eye witness: 'They're getting better,' Chuck said approvingly. 'That one hit the runway'
Running the gauntlet of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades after check-in at Baghdad airport.
Baghdad, Iraq (The Independent)--I was in the police station in the town of Fallujah when I realised the extent of the schizophrenia. Captain Christopher Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the nature of the attacks so regularly carried out against American forces in the Sunni Muslim Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential rest home down the road--"Dreamland", the Americans call it--but this was not the extent of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are being attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino called them--and rightly so.
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Invasion of Iraq: War lite: Six months after the fall of Baghdad
Monday, October 20 @ 17:49:36 UTC | By Helena Cobban, Dar al-Hayat
It is six months since Baghdad fell to General Tommy Franks' forces, and already it is clear that the Bush administration's decision to launch the fundamentally unilateral, preventive war of early 2003 will change the whole Middle East and the whole global balance - but just not in the way they intended it to.
When Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld persuaded the President to launch this kind of war, in this kind of way, they were evidently hoping that it would send a huge wave of "shock and awe" not just through Iraq's military leadership, not just through the Middle East - but throughout the whole world. The swift and victorious assault against Iraq was designed to be the dramatic opening scene in a broader campaign to persuade the whole world of the sheer unstoppability of the unilateralist, "preventive war" doctrine that the President had outlined in his infamous "National Security Strategy" document of September 2002.
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Invasion of Iraq: Khidhir Hamza: The bogus intelligence source
Wednesday, October 15 @ 11:20:23 UTC | By Imad Khadduri
Former Iraqi nuclear scientist
yellowtimes.org
Belatedly, in a September 29, 2003 article in the New York Times by Douglas Jehl, the Defense Intelligence Agency has awkwardly admitted that most of the intelligence and information offered by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) for the past several years, which was provided by Iraqi defectors of questionable credibility, was of little to no value, all at a cost of $150 billion, more than 300 dead American soldiers, and at least 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians.
A prominent and callus epithet of such defectors mentioned in the above article is Khidhir Hamza, the self-claimed Iraqi atomic "Bomb Maker." Given a short lived assignment in the Iraqi nuclear program in 1987 to lead the atomic bomb design team, he was kicked out a few months later for petty theft. Reduced to a non-entity in the accelerated nuclear weapons program between 1987 and the start of the 1991 war, he retired from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in 1989 and became a college lecturer, a stock market swindler and a shady business middle-man.
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