Diff'rent Strokes - CIA Torture Decision

From Yahoo News:

Iraq has quietly agreed to pay $400 million in claims to American citizens who say they were tortured or traumatized by Saddam Hussein's regime.

From The New York Times:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the CIA could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information..

The financially (and politically) bankrupt Iraqi government is forced to pay for the sins of a past government that it played no part in, while the affluent(?) US government that is involved in the cases of many abused Iraqis hides from the blame it richly deserves.

The Peace of Obama's Speechwriters Pt.3

''Like any sovereign, independent nation, Iraq is free to chart its own course. And by the end of next year, all of our troops will be home."

Thus spake Obama today. I don't think there is an honest word or comma in that statement.

Robert Fisk On Democracy In The Middle East

Saddam and WMD - A Play in One Act

Dramatis Personae:-
George Bush - A doltish middle aged recovered alcoholic
Tony Blair - A sycophantic narcissist
Various other gullible or obsequious national leaders.

ACT 1, SCENE 1

Bush : Even if Saddam has no WMD the Iraqi army has devastating weapons systems, lethal.
Blair : How do you know?"
Bush : We looked at the receipts.

CURTAIN(S)

As Obama Pretends To Withdraw - Some Benefits for Iraqis To Be Grateful For

I would say this speaks for itself. It is a significant dip in quality of life for most Iraqis even compared to Saddam's time. Of course it only applies to those who have survived the Saddam years and (god help us) 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'.

Al Megrahi Release - US Hypocrisy

The US Senate are trying to coerce the Scottish First Minister to give evidence on the release as part of their inquiry. You may recall that the horrendous Lockerbie attack was linked, accurately, to the shooting down in July 1988 of Iran Air Flight 655 by USS Vincennes. Where is the US Senate inquiry into that massacre of men, women and children? 290 dead - an 'accident' the US said.

This affair also serves to reopen the Iraq debate, in a way that vindicates Blair's most severe critics. Tony Blair's remaining defenders say he was motivated in Iraq by a hatred of terrorism and tyranny and had no regard whatsoever for getting access to oil. Yet at the very same time the New£abour government was plotting in Libya to hand the worst terrorist in British history to a tyrant in exchange for oil. It's proof that oil and corporate power were a much bigger factor in driving foreign policy than the public rhetoric of opposing tyranny or terror.

David Cameron refuses to open an investigation. He says he will release all the relevant documents – but the Cabinet Office has quietly declared that Blair's permission will be needed before any records are shown to the public. For the families of all the innocent people slaughtered in Lockerbie, this has been a cold-water education in what their governments really value. Cohen, remembering her murdered 20 year-old daughter Theodora, says: "Western governments seem to be run by one thing now – the great God money."

There's a revealing postscript to this story. Last month, Blair went to Libya on behalf of the many mega-corporations who now employ him. He was greeted by Gaddaffi himself – who tortures dissidents and terrorises his population –"like a brother", according to the Libyan press. There has even been speculation that, now they need a CEO, Tony Blair will go to work for BP. In so many ways, it seems, he always has.

Blair Vs Manningham-Buller - He Said, She Said

False claims of links between al-Qa'ida and Saddam Hussein
Tony Blair claimed on 21 Jan 2003:
"There is some intelligence evidence about loose links between al-Qa'ida and various people in Iraq... It would not be correct to say there is no evidence whatever of linkages between al-Qa'ida and Iraq."Foreign Office spokesman claimed on 29 Jan 2003: "We believe that there have been, and still are, some al-Qa'ida operatives in parts of Iraq controlled by Baghdad. It is hard to imagine that they are there without the knowledge and acquiescence of the Iraqi government."

Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5, this week:
"There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA."
Hand-picking flimsy 'intelligence'
Blair, to the Commons 24 Sept 2002:
"It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability..."

Blair, to the Commons 25 Feb 2003:
"The intelligence is clear: He [Saddam] continues to believe his WMD programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression. The biological agents we believe Iraq can produce include anthrax, botulinum, toxin, aflatoxin and ricin. All eventually result in excruciatingly painful death."

Manningham-Buller, this week:

"The nature of intelligence – it is a source of information, it is rarely complete, it needs to be assessed, it is fragmentary... We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence to it [the September 2002 dossier] and we refused because we didn't think it was reliable."Iraq posed no risk to Britain
Blair, to the Commons 10 April 2002:
"Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also."

Manningham-Buller, this week:

"We regarded the direct threat from Iraq as low... we didn't believe he had the capability to do anything in the UK."
Ministers were told that invading Iraq would increase the threat of terrorism to Britain
Blair, farewell speech at the Labour conference, 26 September 2006:
"This terrorism isn't our fault. We didn't cause it. It's not the consequence of foreign policy."
Manningham-Buller, this week:
"It was communicated through the JIC assessments, to which I fed in... I believe they [senior ministers] did read them. If they read them, they can have had no doubt."The Iraq war made Britain a more dangerous place and allowed al-Qa'ida to gain a hold in Iraq
Blair, 29 Jan 2010:
"If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better, I believe we are. The world is safer as a result.''

Manningham-Buller, this week:

"Our involvement in Iraq radicalised a generation of young people who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as an attack on Islam. We [MI5] were pretty well swamped... with intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of plots, leads to plots and things that we needed to pursue."We gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.

The post-Iraq plots
7/7 bombers - 2005
The bombs detonated on London Underground trains and a bus in July 2005 killed 52 members of the public and injured around 700. Three of the four suicide bombers had been born in Yorkshire; the fourth, born in Jamaica, came to the UK aged five. In his video, one bomber said: "Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities."

London Haymarket/Glasgow Airport attacks – 2007
Bilal Abdulla, a doctor, and Kafeel Ahmed, a PhD engineering student, tried and failed to set off bombs outside a London nightclub on 29 June. The following day they drove a jeep filled with gas canisters into Glasgow Airport. Abdulla's trial heard his involvement was "because of events in Iraq".

Liquid bomb plot – 2006
A terror plot was exposed in which liquid bombs were to be smuggled on to airliners. Many of the men made 'suicide' videos citing British foreign policy. Umar Islam said in his video: "If you think you can go into our land and do what you are doing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and... think it will not come back on to your doorstep, you have another think coming."

Iraq Casualties - A State of Ignorance

A new report has been published on the pathetic efforts of the UK Government to keep a handle on the scale of civilian casualties and carnage in Iraq. Link to the full report here

The New Iraq - Thanks, America

COURTNEY E. MARTIN | July 12,

From American Prospect

When Nation-Building Becomes Cowardly Escape

Americans should be outraged that shoddy infrastructure and broken promises will be our legacy in Iraq. If you walk down Falluja's busiest streets, you are likely to travel parallel with open trenches that smell of putrid waste. These trenches, vestiges of a planned but unfinished sewage treatment system, are more than an eyesore and an assault on the olfactory senses. They are a reminder of America's broken promises in the ongoing nation-building effort in Iraq.The New York Times reported last week that many of the most fundamental needs of the Iraqi people, the most vital infrastructure projects, have been abandoned. Of the long-planned sewage system, for example, theTimes reports, "After more than six years of work, $104 million spent, and without having connected a single house, American reconstruction officials have decided to leave the troubled system only partly finished, infuriating many city residents." The project was initially supposed to treat waste for Falluja's entire population (200,000 people), with room to grow by 50 percent. Now it will, at best, serve 4,300, before the Americans working on the project leave town.Iraqi citizens shouldn't be the only ones infuriated by our military's half-assed effort to rebuild a nation that we so righteously destroyed not so long ago. Americans should also be outraged. We should be fuming. This war was fought in our names, and now shoddy infrastructure and broken promises will be our legacy. We should be calling our political representatives and demanding that the U.S. military finish what it started in Iraq and implement a long-term plan for incorporating nation-building practices effectively and ethically.The RAND Corporation reports, "Nation-building has been a controversial mission over the past decade, and the extent of this controversy has undoubtedly curtailed the investments needed to do these tasks better. So has institutional resistance in both the state and defense departments, neither of which regards nation-building among its core missions. As a result, successive administrations tend to treat each new such mission as if it were the first and, more importantly, the last." In other words, we reinvent the wheel (badly), following every new conflict. We can argue the morality of wars, but as long as we keep participating in them, we must be committed to leaving them with dignity and integrity.In a study of the seven historical attempts by the U.S. to nation-build -- in Germany, Japan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan -- RAND found that "there is no quick-fix" and that "none of our cases was successfully completed in less than seven years." It's worth remembering that we started the Iraq War before finishing the job in Afghanistan. Now we want to bail before the job's done in Iraq, too, setting ourselves up for another half-cooked polity and a continued world of hurt.The financial costs are high, indeed, but the costs in terms of security and morality are potentially even higher. Our nation-building blunders are not just ineffective and embarrassing; they're downright dangerous. Leaving a taste like this in Iraqis' parched mouths is certainly not going to make Americans any safer. The president of the Falluja City Council told The New York Times: "I told the Americans if they want to leave a good impression ? and to erase bad feelings about the United States from the war, they should finish this project completely and properly. It was supposed to be finished in two years, then five years, and it still isn't complete. There's been no benefit to us."Even many of the projects that do look to be on the path to completion are being finished so quickly and haphazardly that engineering standards have been thrown out the window. Shaymaa Mohammad Ameen, who works with reconstruction officials as a liaison for the Diyala Provincial Council, told the Times that "American officials frequently threatened to leave when Iraqis questioned engineering standards and brought up other safety issues."The U.S. is slipping out of Iraq, base by base, soldier by soldier, not with a bang but with a whimper of unfulfilled promises and blatant denials. Sure it would be nice to just come home, as so many on the left have argued. No one wants our troops in Iraq any longer than is necessary. But what's even worse than prolonging their presence is undermining their work thus far by asking them to leave a job shoddily and incompletely done. Our troops' integrity -- and that of the country -- is at stake.When asked about the abandoned projects and dwindling quality of those that haven't yet been scraped, Col. Dionysios Anninos, head of the Army Corps of Engineers, told theTimes: "I am not aware of the Iraqis having any sort of hard feelings that we will not finish current projects." Really? You break a promise to five-sixths of Falluja's population and no one seems perturbed? And then, as if to add insult to injury, he enthusiastically added, "We will finish strong!"This isn't nation-building; this is cowardly escape. The American public shouldn't stand for it. Additional research by Krystie Yandoli.

Like To Buy a Murderous Gang of Mercenaries?

The security company formerly known as Blackwater is looking for new ownership, announcing Monday that it is pursuing a sale of the company that became famous for its involvement with the U.S. government in Iraq and elsewhere. The Moyock, N.C.-based company now called Xe Services announced its decision in a brief statement that gave few details.
"Xe's new management team has made significant changes and improvements to the company over the last 15 months, which have enabled the company to better serve the U.S. government and other customers, and will deliver additional value to a purchaser," the statement said.
Owner and founder Erik Prince said selling the company is a difficult decision, but constant criticism of Xe helped him make up his mind. "Performance doesn't matter in Washington, just politics," he said.
The private company became infamous as Blackwater, which provided guards and services to the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It became one of the biggest defence contractors in the world, but it also attracted criticism over its role in those missions.
It has been trying to rehabilitate its image since a 2007 shooting incident in Baghdad that killed 17 people, outraged the Iraqi government and led to federal charges against several Blackwater guards. The accusations later were thrown out on a technicality after a judge found that prosecutors mishandled evidence. In March, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin suggested the Pentagon should consider banning Xe from a $1 billion deal to train Afghan police. He said he thought the company's involvement was hindering the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The announcement comes less than 3 months after Xe sold its aviation division for $200 million to AAR Corp in a bid to boost Xe's balance sheet.
More recently, five former executives, including Gary Jackson, the company's ex-president, were indicted on charges of conspiring to violate US firearms laws. Jackson was among the top officials who left the company last year.

Iraq - Who Is Killing Who? Short Clip (Graphic)

Kinnock on Iraq – ‘ Let’s Move On'

Lets move on, Neil? Move on from 1.5M people (low estimate) displaced? Move on from 300,000 men, women and children(very low estimate) dead? Move on from white phosphorous and depleted uranium-induced deformities in babies in Fallujah? Move on from Abu Ghraib, torture and rendition? Move on from the billions wasted in creating chaos and a Shiite theocracy in Iraq? Yes I bet you and your New Labour friends would like to move on. On the bright side, most of your candidates will be moving on to a career outside politics after the election on 6^th May and it will be largely as a result of the Iraq bloodbath and the other betrayals of everything that the Labour movement ever stood for. Why did they wheel you out to utter this crass, cynical garbage? Because Brown and Milliband and Mandelson don’t want their names in the same sentence as the word Iraq. You on the other hand are expendable to New Labour (and everyone else now). Roll on May 7^th. Clegg for PM.

Secret Jail Abuse In Iraq

They were held at al-Muthanna until the human rights ministry gained access to the prison and closed the facility.

"We were tortured for four long months continuously," another former detainee said.

"Whether you recognise or not, whatever they want you to say, they keep torturing you and the prisoners. They died in the torture."

Link To Short Video Here

Lobby Your Candidate on The War Debacles

Details of your candidate here. The occupations must be debated.

Iraq Death Squad

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad's poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.

At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying. Full Story Here.

A Voice For Survivors - Iraq

The story of a young woman whose life was changed when she was shot by a US convoy. Her face is obscured here for her safety. She shared her incredible story of struggle and survival with CIVIC's associate director Marla Keenan in Amman.

Collateral Murder - Full Transcript

Full Transcript: 

HERE.


Clip: 


HERE.

Planned Attack on Iran - Diego Garcia To Be Launchpad?

US plans to use the British island of Diego Garcia as a base to attack Iran are the subject of much dodging and weaving by the Foreign Office at present. David Milliband has repeatedly evaded questions on its role in any forthcoming assault on Iran. Opposition politicians are questioning the role played by the Indian Ocean atoll in previous attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a staging post for extraordinary rendition. It is now documented that some of the US airstrikes in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and in Afghanistan on numerous occasions since 2001 have come from the island. Sir Menzies Campbell MP has condemned the use of British territory for these purposes. The US operates a military base there but the UK Government has been reluctant to give details on the agreement which allows this to happen. Ed Davey MP the liberal democrat said yesterday:

'the events relating to this island of shame have damaged Britain's international reputation'. Not that there's much left of it it seems to us at WITC. Last week a number of US media sources exposed a consignment of US 'bunker buster' bombs destined for god knows where which were diverted to Diego Garcia. I am going to see my own MP next month about the use of Scottish airports by the US Military in the evil rendition process (a recent scandal emerged in Ireland about security costs resulting from US personnel passing through their airports to occupied territories and the related costs to Irish citizens). I will be taking a sheaf of articles about Diego Garcia along with me. US Navy propaganda travelogue for the island here

Iraq - 7 Years On and Worse Off Than Ever

H/T to Reality Zone for the link.

Fallujah - Latest Horrors

Stories were widespread at the time(see posts on this site) about white phosphorous and depleted uranium being used by the US Military in Fallujah. The predictable denials were, as ever, unconvincing.Click on post title for full details from BBC.





Officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children.
Doctors and parents believe the problem is the highly sophisticated weapons the US troops used in Fallujah six years ago.
British-based Iraqi researcher Malik Hamdan told the BBC's World Today programme that doctors in Fallujah were witnessing a "massive unprecedented number" of heart defects, and an increase in the number of nervous system defects.
She said that one doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 - when she saw about one case every two months - with the situation now, when, she saw cases every day.