The Iraq War Links to articles on other websites Links added before 2005-04-01

The Iraq War Main page

Click here for links added since 2005-04-01.

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On this page articles are listed in chronological order (oldest first).
All links were working as at 2005-12-11.

• George Monbiot, 2003-04-01: It will end in disaster

  The US and British governments have dragged us into a mess that will last for years.

• Noam Chomsky: Iraq is a trial run

  So the United States is telling the countries of the world [in effect] ... that they had better develop a terrorist network and weapons of mass destruction or some other credible deterrent; if not, they are vulnerable to 'preventive war'.

• Paul W. Schroeder: Iraq: The Case Against Preemptive War

  The administration's claim of a right to overthrow regimes it considers hostile is extraordinary — and one the world will soon find intolerable.

• Michel Guerrin: Embedded Photographer: "I Saw Marines Kill Civilians"

• Carmen Lawrence: What War?

  Despite the thump and stutter of war, there is an eerie silence in Australia. ... They [the Australians] don't want to know that the Red Cross reported this week that the number of casualties in Iraq is so high that the medical staff have stopped counting and the hospitals are overwhelmed. They would prefer not to be disturbed by the screams of the wounded and the grief-stricken sobbing of orphaned children and smashed families.

• J.B.Gerald: Responding to a Criminal War

• Jay Bookman: The President's Real Goal In Iraq

• James Conachy: US troops gun down Iraqi demonstrators

  US troops opened fire on a night-time demonstration by students and youth in the Iraqi town of Fallujah on Monday, April 28. Thirteen Iraqis are dead, as many as 75 are wounded ... According to Fallujah residents, the demonstration was a spontaneous expression of opposition by students to the takeover of the town's school by the US military.

  The US military version is that people within the crowd were carrying AK-47 rifles and that they fired both into the air and at the school. ... The Associated Press has also reported that there is no evidence of gunfire damage to the school.

• Robert Scheer: Are We Numb or Dumb?

  It is expected that despots can force the blind allegiance of their people to falsehoods. But it is frightening in the extreme when lying matters not at all to a free people.

• Kate Randall: US subjects Iraqi detainees to "inhuman treatment"

  The US military's treatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan — which has included sleep deprivation, extended shackling of prisoners, selective withholding of medical treatment, blindfolding, hooding and forcing prisoners to stand in painful positions for hours — is clearly illegal under the UN anti-torture convention as ratified by the US Congress in 1994.

• Eleanor Robson: Iraq's museums: what really happened

• James Roger Brown: President George W. "Brown Finger" Bush

  [T]he contents of the Baghdad Museum covered at least 5,000 years of human history. Bush Administration arrogance and incompetence in one act of sheer banal stupidity has swept from the table of human knowledge over a century worth of the product of archeological science.

• Pinter blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair

  The playwright Harold Pinter last night likened George W Bush's administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying the US was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched.

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• Currency Wars: Euro versus Dollar

  The Europeans and the Moslem world cannot stop the United States military when loosed by Washington, but it might be able to stop American aggression by destabilizing and collapsing the American dollar which would effectively put a halt to Washington's policy of armed aggression ...

• Peter Dale Scott: Bush's Deep Reasons for War on Iraq: Oil, Petrodollars and the Opec Euro Question

• W. Clark: The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War With Iraq — A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth  (It's the euro.)

• David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor: We are now a client state

  Britain has by now lost its sovereignty to the United States and has become a client state.  ... At the height of the Iraq fighting, David Blunkett went to Washington to be praised by John Ashcroft ... Blunkett agreed that the UK would extradite Britons to the US in future, without any need to produce prima facie evidence that they are guilty of anything. But the US refused to do the same with their own citizens.

• F. William Engdahl: A New American Century?  Iraq and the hidden euro-dollar wars

  Now, as Iraq threatens to explode in internal chaos, it is important to rethink the entire postwar monetary order anew. The present French-German-Russian alliance to create a counterweight to the United States requires not merely a French-led version of the Petro-dollar system, some Petro-euro system, that continues the bankrupt American Century, only with a French accent, and euros replacing dollars. That would only continue to destroy living standards across the world, adding to human waste and soaring unemployment in industrial as well as developing nations. We must entirely rethink what began briefly with some economists during the 1998 Asia crisis, the basis of a new monetary system which supports human development, and does not destroy it.

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• Bush's Mission: Expecting the Second Platform of Moral Outrage  (PDF file.)

• Julian Borger: The spies who pushed for war

  ... senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs ... The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld ... [and] functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.

• Washington Post: Wolfowitz Concedes Iraq Errors [Page disappeared]

  ... Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, who was appointed to be the first civilian coordinator in the occupation, said in an interview that he asked Wolfowitz for an expert on Iraqi politics and governance. Wolfowitz turned not to the roster of career specialists in the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs bureau, but to a political appointee in the bureau: Elizabeth Cheney, coordinator of a Middle East democracy project and daughter of the vice president ...

• Michael C. Ruppert: Beyond Bush — Part I

  George W. Bush is just a hired CEO who is about to be removed by the "Board of Directors". Who are they? Are they going to choose his replacement? Are you going to help them?

  What can change this Board of Directors and the way the "Corporation" protects its interests? These are the only issues that matter.

• Latest White House lies reveal larger hidden untruths

  Certainly it was time to kill someone other than poor old Saddam, who has allegedly been killed so often by American forces that nowadays no-one, including American servicemen, believes this pathetic rubbish. So the staged deaths of "hated" Uday and Qusay Hussein were a new version of the old Saddam theme, designed not only to demoralize the Iraqi people, but also to bolster American military morale, which recently reached non-existent level in Iraq.

• Derek Dillon: Unrevolution

  One must conclude that the Saddam affair has nothing to do with terrorism, Israel, or WsMD. Saddam, ... like 9/11, is a pretext to proceed with much larger strategic plans having their origins quite awhile ago, and evolving into greater and greater concreteness since soon after collapse of the U.S.S.R. Probably the U.S. considers it necessary to get control of the whole of Middle East oil sooner rather then later (a five-plus year project in itself) because China and Russia are more likely to respond to U.S. initiatives in this regard with tactical accommodation earlier, and less likely, later, as China's military strength grows and Russia recovers from her recent travail.

• Renan Talieva: The Coroner and David Kelly

• Our doubts about Dr Kelly's suicide

  As specialist medical professionals, we do not consider the evidence given at the Hutton inquiry has demonstrated that Dr David Kelly committed suicide.  ... We dispute that Dr Kelly could have died from haemorrhage or from Co-Proxamol ingestion or from both.

• America's Least Wanted

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• Scott Fleming:
  • Dispatch From Baghdad

    George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney are insane. I don't know what they think they are doing here, but if it involves order and sanity they have failed miserably and indefinitely.

  • Dispatch From Baghdad, Part II

    We spent the better part of this afternoon in the middle of a firefight. ... The assault took place on al-Karada street ... We later learned that U.S. troops, to their misfortune, are fond of stopping their patrols there and going shopping for porn DVDs sold by street vendors.

• Secret Burials in the Desert: Ultimate Disrespect for U.S. Army Personnel in Iraq

  Mazen's scoop began when he realized that the U.S. troops were burying human bodies wrapped in plastic in the desert. Initially, he thought that these were the bodies of Iraqi people. ... Ultimately he found a source, a U.S. mercenary, who told him that those buried were not Iraqis, but mercenaries who had been promised green cards and U.S. citizenship in return for serving in the U.S. Army. Besides, according to this source, not a few of those interred were Americans who had been killed in combat.

• Chris Marsden and Julie Hyland: Britain: Inquiry exposes lies on Iraq war

  Any objective reading of the evidence given ... proves that the government was intent on shaping intelligence material to suit its war aims.  In testimony from Powell, Campbell and others, it emerged that the prime minister's office and his top officials were all involved in a campaign to secure from the intelligence services the type of material they felt necessary to justify recourse to war.

• [Australian] Govt 'lied every time' over Iraq, [former intelligence officer Andrew] Wilkie says [Page removed from the Wayback Machine, but still availabe here.]

  "The Government lied when it associated Iraq with the Bali bombing and the Government lied every time that it associated Iraq with the war on terror."

  

• Takver: Against Terrorism, Against War — Melbourne Protests for Peace

• Brian Coughley: What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?

  There is no doubt that war crimes have been committed by US troops in Iraq.  ... [The] US Army must abide by its own rules. If it does not, it will eventually suffer a moral and morale collapse.

• Brian Coughley: Never Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History

• David North: The crisis of American capitalism and the war against Iraq

  The "war of choice" being launched by the Bush administration is in no legal sense fundamentally different from the decisions and actions for which the Nazi leaders were tried and hanged in October 1946. The US government knows this very well, and that is why it refuses to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

• Andrew McKillop: The End of the world as we know it

  From the early 1990s any recalcitrant supplier of vital resources, firstly and notably Iraq, but then any country, state, regime, or ethnic group became a 'targetable' entity if it in any way menaced the supply of cheap energy and resources. Behind this new doctrine is the simple, and impossible objective of ensuring the perennity of urban industrial consumer kulchur, a mindless 'doctrine' of blind hedonism, greedy egoism, and the destruction of the planet's life systems, ensuring mass dieoff within decades unless it is completely abandoned ...

• Pratap Chatterjee: Halliburton Makes a Killing on Iraq War

• Pratap Chatterjee and Herbert Docena: OCCUPATION, INC.

  War profiteers in Iraq pursue quick fixes and high profits by overcharging for shoddy work, while Iraqis protest that they could do the work better and cheaper. Welcome to the reconstruction racket.

• Cheney's Halliburton Ties Remain

  Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 through August 2000. The company's KBR subsidiary is the main government contractor working to restore Iraq's oil industry in an open-ended contract that was awarded without competitive bidding.

• Rick Kelly: Bush grants permanent legal immunity to US corporations looting Iraqi oil

  Executive Order (EO) 13303 ... provides unlimited authority for US corporations to loot Iraqi oil and grants them permanent immunity from any legal actions over the consequences.

• Julie Hyland: The Hutton Inquiry: British spy chief's testimony exposes lies on Iraq war

  ... [John] Scarlett [head of the Joint Intelligence Committee] told the inquiry that the 45-minute claim did not relate to chemical and biological weapons at all, but to ordinary armaments. The intelligence related to smaller range munitions, 'battlefield mortar shells or small calibre weaponry,' Scarlett said, rather than warheads for long-range missiles as many had been led to assume.

• Chris Marsden: Britain's Hutton Inquiry: Still no account of how Dr. Kelly died

  The Hutton Inquiry, though ostensibly set up to investigate [David] Kelly's death, has done no such thing. It has discussed the events leading up to Kelly being found dead, but not how he died.

• Racist "Transformation Strategies": The Pirates have already lost in Iraq

  U.S. recruitment of Saddam's former secret police ... is proof that occupation authorities feel surrounded and helpless against the popular forces that have been set in motion in Iraq, and will soon abandon a policy of co-optation in favor of assassination and fomenting civil war. The final nail will be driven into the coffin of the corporate "transformation" of Iraq, and events will unfold along the more familiar paths of national resistance to occupation.

  The assassination on 2003-08-28 of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim (who had been calling for the US to quit Iraq) was instigated by Americans and was intended to promote a Sunni/Shia civil war (so as to divide the forces opposing American occupation and reduce attacks upon American troops).

• Farah tried to plead with the US troops but she was killed anyway (Also here.)

• Stephen J. Sniegoski: The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel

  ... Washington eased up on its own technology export restrictions to Iraq, which allowed the Iraqis to import supercomputers, machine tools, poisonous chemicals, and even strains of anthrax and bubonic plague. In short, the United States helped arm Iraq with the very weaponry of horror that administration officials are now trumpeting as justification for forcibly removing Saddam from power.

• Mark Littman: A Supreme International Crime: Any Member of a Government Backing an Aggressive War Will Be Open to Prosecution

• John Pilger: The "supreme international crime"

  This carnage, wrought in an unprovoked illegal assault on a sovereign country, is a crime by any measure of international law: be it the United Nations Charter or the Geneva conventions. The "supreme international crime," the Nuremberg judges decided, was that of unprovoked aggression, because it contains "the accumulated evil" of all war crimes.

  Blair has committed this crime.

  And so has George W. Bush and his accomplices — not only Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and others in Washington but also Tony Blair and John Howard. They are all war criminals and should stand trial for their crimes.

• A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition Responds to President Bush's National Television Address of September 7, 2003

  During his administration, Bush has only rarely felt that he must address the people, and does so when he fears that a sentiment is growing strong enough to challenge his illegal actions. He must then lie more [than he usually does] to convince the people of the U.S. to support his criminal endeavors, or at least acquiesce in them.

• Christopher Scheer: Ten Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq

  What follows are just the most outrageous and significant of the dozens of outright lies uttered by Bush and his top officials over the past year in what amounts to a systematic campaign to scare the bejeezus out of everybody:  ...

• U.S. Bombing Watch: Archive of U.S. Bombings, Invasions and Occupations of Iraq

• Jim Vallette and Pratap Chatterjee: Guarding the Oil Underworld in Iraq

• Brian Cloughley: Don't Reinforce Failure in Iraq

  Why should France and Germany and all others who opposed the war now bend the knee to Bush and help him out of his problem?  After all, the Bush administration insisted that France and Germany were the problem so far as Iraq was concerned.  ... [Now Rumsfeld] expects Paris and Berlin to look kindly on Washington's desperate pleas for cooperation in order to make life easier for Bush in his approach to election year.

• U.S. Backed Mossad Agents Involved in Hakim's Assassination to Flee Iraq

  The U.S. Central Command helped 15 Mossad agents involved in the assassination of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim to flee Iraq ...

  The U.S. Centcom acquired conviction about the plot after examining the explosives used in the operation; the explosives which were highly advanced are used only by Mossad, the weekly added.

• William Blum: Myth and denial in the War on Terrorism

  In light of the several instances mentioned above — and others can be given — of U.S. officials giving the game away, in effect admitting that terrorists and guerrillas may be, or in fact are, reacting to perceived hurts and injustices, it may be that George W. is the only true believer among them, if in fact he is one. The leaders of the American Empire may well know — at least occasionally when they're sitting alone at midnight — that all their expressed justifications for invading Iraq and Afghanistan and for their "War on Terrorism" are no more than fairy tales for young children and grown-up innocents.

• Brian Cloughley: Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld — One Miscalculation After Another

  US defence secretary Rumsfeld, as imperious, bullying, sneering, abrasive and unlovely a zealot as ever disgraced the pages of American history ... is a raving idiot who fantasises about what is going on in the country he has destroyed.

• The hunt for weapons of mass destruction yields — nothing

• BBC: [Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans] Blix criticises UK's Iraq dossier

  He compared the way Britain and America were sure Iraq had weapons of mass destruction programmes to the way people in the Middle Ages were convinced witches existed and so found them when they looked.

• [Senator Edward] Kennedy labels Iraq war a 'fraud'

  He said administration officials relied on "distortion, misrepresentation, a selection of intelligence" to justify their case for war.

• Marjorie Cohn: Bush & Co. Fear Prosecution in the International Criminal Court

  Ninety-one countries have signed on as parties to the ICC treaty. So why has the Bush administration resisted it so vehemently? Bush's handlers were likely prescient about how the world would react to the United States' illegal invasion of Iraq, which was not executed with Security Council approval or in lawful self-defense. They evidently knew they and their boss might be vulnerable to prosecutions for the unlawful killing of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the destruction of the civilian infrastructure, and the use of weapons of mass destruction — cluster bombs and depleted uranium — by "coalition forces."

  

• Kelly P. O'Meara: New DynCorp Contract Draws Scrutiny

• Chris Floyd: Global Eye — Feeding Frenzy

• Bill Vann: Bush at the UN — a war criminal takes the podium

  Unlike the American people, the Bush administration is more than willing to accept the resulting increase in young American soldiers, reservists and National Guard members dying daily to secure increased profits for the administration's corporate backers.

• Eric Margolis: The crusade against 'terrorism'

  What Bush should do is declare victory and bring U.S. troops home. Now. Save $166 billion and many, many lives. It's still not too late to climb out of the swamp.

• Bill Vann: White House bans news coverage of coffins returning from Iraq

  As it becomes clear to ever broader sections of the population that these deaths were unnecessary and the result of what can only be described as a criminal enterprise, the demand will inevitably grow for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and a settling of accounts with those responsible for the needless killing of both Iraqis and Americans.

• BRING THEM HOME NOW

  Our mission is to mobilize military families, veterans, and GIs themselves to demand: an end to the occupation of Iraq and other misguided military adventures; and an immediate return of all US troops to their home duty stations.

  The truth is coming out. The American public was deceived by the Bush administration about the motivation for and intent of the invasion of Iraq. It is equally apparent that the administration is stubbornly and incompetently adhering to a destructive course.

• Electronic Iraq

• William A. Cook: Of Pariahs and Pre-emptive Strikes

• Stan Goff: Piss On My Leg — Perception Control and the Stage Management of War

• Patrick Cockburn: US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops

  US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

• Brian Cloughley: Watch These Hostile Lemon Trees and Other Enemies

  Down in the depths of his rancid little psyche, Bush has conjured up a new war which is uncannily reminiscent of the Nixon years.

• Adrian Zupp: Why Won't the Dalai Lama Pick a Fight?

  So, given his intelligence and enormous sense of compassion, why doesn't the Dalai Lama question the leader of the free world about ... the unlawful attack on Iraq? Civilian body counts? Why doesn't he even pose such questions rhetorically in the media? ... When it comes to geopolitical and global economic matters, is the Dalai Lama living in peaceful ignorance in the suburbs of reality?

• Joe Vialls: Baghdad Nuke Marks Bali Anniversary

• Richard Phillips: Australia: Protesters face jail over Opera House antiwar slogan

  [T]hose guilty of the real "malicious damage" are the Bush administration and its Australian and British allies, who lied about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and flagrantly breached UN conventions and international law in order to launch a criminal act of aggression and plunder against a poverty-stricken country.

  Right — and those arse-licking Australian politicians (just about all of them except the Greens) are just bloody traitors and a damned disgrace to their country.

• Madrid Social Forum: Ten Conditions for a Just Reconstruction of Iraq

• Wayne M. O'Leary: The domino quagmire

  [T]he entire American political class and diplomatic establishment insist we must stay in Iraq and finish what George W. Bush started, even if it was premised on lies, self-delusions and grandiose dreams of omnipotence. To do otherwise would be to embarrass our leaders, cause the U.S. government to lose face and imply to the world that Washington lacks resolve. Excuse me, but this movie's been shown before. I believe I hear the 1960s calling.

• The Edge has published a four-part series by Gar Smith, entitled "Around the Bend: America's Ministry of Propaganda", describing the Bush Administration's psy-war operation designed to con the American people into supporting the war on Iraq:

  Part 1: A Strategy of Lies: How the White House Fed the Public a Steady Diet of Falsehoods
  Part 2: Transforming Language to Market the Big Lie
  Part 3: Targeting Critics, Spreading Lies, and PSYOPS
  Part 4: Black Programs and the Future of Propaganda

• Growing anger among US troops in Iraq

  An in-depth investigative report published over the past two weeks by the military newspaper Stars & Stripes ... thoroughly documents the existence of a serious morale crisis among the troops in Iraq.

  The Stars & Stripes series can be found here.

• Ian Traynor: The privatisation of war — War is big business

• Stan Goff: WOLVES AND SHEEP (apologies to Canis lupus) — A short history of the Bush Mafia's war in Iraq

• Bill Vann: US, Israel prepare mass killings in Iraq

  The Bush administration is about to launch a campaign of wholesale killings in Iraq with the assistance of the Israeli military ...  In preparation for the new counterinsurgency campaign, the US military has brought urban warfare specialists from the Israeli Defenses Force (IDF) to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the headquarters of the US Special Forces. They are training assassination teams in methods that the IDF has used to suppress Palestinian resistance to the Israel occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

• Operation Mass Appeal

• Scott Ritter: How the British Spy Agency MI6 Secretly Misled A Nation Into War With Iraq

• Seymour Hersh: Moving Targets

• Secondary School under Siege by US Forces  (Also here.)

• Fintan Dunne: World Conned as U.S. Grabs Iraq Santa

• Michel Chossudovsky: War Propaganda and the Capture of Saddam Hussein

• Nicholas von Hoffman: Playing piano in the war whorehouse

• Bush began Iraq plan pre-9/11, O'Neill says

  President Bush and his senior aides began plotting the invasion of Iraq just days after he took office in January 2001 ... according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill ...

• New Blow to Blair over Iraq

  Prime Minister Tony Blair was dealt a fresh blow over Iraq today when a second senior Washington insider said intelligence was misrepresented.

  [Paul O'Neil's claims] were backed today by Greg Thielmann, director of the Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the US State Department until his retirement last year.

  Mr Theilmann told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I'm afraid I think the American public was seriously misled."

  The US administration "twisted, distorted, simplified" intelligence in a way that led Americans to "seriously misunderstand what the nature of the Iraq threat was", he said.

  "I'm not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a President distorting critical information," he said.

• Joe Vialls: The Falklands Alternative — America's motive for invading Iraq

• Eric Margolis: A scandal greater than Watergate  (Also here.)

  Either President George Bush, and secretaries Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, lied about the global threat they claimed Iraq posed, and deceived Congress and the American people. Or, they were grossly misinformed by their intelligence experts and must be judged fools of the first order.

• Chris Floyd: Team Spirit

  At every turn, the OSP [Office of Special Plans] cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. ... Anything that contradicted the Bush Regime's ideological delusions was ruthlessly pruned away. Anything that flattered their desire for war — no matter how specious, how false — was eagerly embraced. ... It's how "Team Bush" has always operated. They pervert intelligence to suit their needs — and their greeds. When they're proved wrong — at a horrendous cost in blood and money — they never admit it, never apologize. They simply break out the whitewash, blame someone else — usually the very intelligence services they've suborned — and lumber on in their brutal quest for dominance: ignorant, incompetent and untouchable to the end.

• John W. Dean: President Bush's New Iraq Commission Won't Be Investigating the Key WMD Issue: How the Executive Order Fatally Limits Their Agenda

  With a few strokes of his pen, Bush had an Executive Order that he can now use to remove the issue of his administration's distorting Saddam's pre-war WMD intelligence from the 2004 campaign. "The commission is studying the matter," they will say ...

  [Bush] succinctly stated the inquiry's purpose (when reading his prepared statement) as follows: "The commission I have appointed today will examine intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and related 21st century threats and issue specific recommendations to ensure our capabilities are strong. The commission will compare what the Iraq Survey Group learns with the information we had prior to our Operation Iraqi Freedom. It will review our intelligence on weapons programs in countries such as North Korea and Iran. It will examine our intelligence on the threats posed by Libya and Afghanistan before recent changes in those countries."

  What does any of that have to do with whether or not the Bush administration misused, falsely reported, or concocted intelligence to take the nation to war? Nothing.

• 2004-03-13: U.S. Unloading WMD in Iraq

• Howard Zinn: The Ultimate Betrayal

  The people of the United States have been betrayed, because with the Cold War over and "the threat of communism" no longer able to justify the stealing of trillions of the public's tax dollars for the military budget, that theft of the national wealth continues. It continues at the expense of the sick, the children, the elderly, the homeless, the unemployed ...

• Michael C. Ruppert: BEYOND BUSH II

  Even though Win Without War supports a withdrawal from Iraq, the fact is that withdrawal is impossible, and it's not going to happen. The US will never let go of Iraqi oil. But the message is clear: Change front men and continue with the program. No matter who wins in 2004, the game will be played as Vietnam was played — but for much higher stakes.

• Tariq Ali: The bloody price of occupation: How far will the US go to maintain its illegitimate primacy in Iraq?

  The occupation authorities are trapped. The occupation is costing $3.9bn a month. Politically, if they permit a democratic election they could get a government whose legitimacy is unchallengeable and which wants them out of the country. If they go for a rigged, Florida-style vote, it would be impossible to contain Shia anger and an armed resistance would commence in the south, raising the spectre of a civil war.

• Patrick Seale: Americans know they have gone well past the point of no return

  The American public is waking up to the fact that the country has got itself into a very deep hole in Iraq, from which it sees no obvious exit.  ...

  Members of the Congress, Democratic presidential candidates, retired generals, leading academics, and a media that has remembered its professional duty to the public, are all turning their guns on the Bush administration.

  In an unprecedented attack on the Defence Secretary, The Washington Post wrote on September 14 [2003] that Donald Rumsfeld might be remembered as 'a principal architect of a foreign policy disaster.'

A principal architect, along with Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Ashcroft, not only of a foreign policy disaster but of a disaster for the United States of America and its people, who (unless they save themselves) will soon become no better off in any respect than the inhabitants of those "third world" countries whom they have been exploiting indirectly (via the US multinational corporations) for the last half-century.

When the hawks in the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq they initiated a process which will result in the destruction of the U.S.A.  It is just a matter of time.

• Joe Vialls: America Commits Suicide in Iraq

  The bottom line is that Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld have taken the brakes off a giant million-man Shi'ite war machine called the Mehdi Army, and all Moqtada al-Sadr has to do now to start it rolling, is turn the ignition key. Remember, the Shi'ite Mehdi Army brackets all American exfiltration routes south towards Kuwait, which is the only way out for 110,000+ American servicemen.

• Barry Grey: The real lessons of Fallujah

  The comparison between the methods of the US in Iraq and those of Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank is apt. In the coming days and weeks the methods of mass reprisal, assassination and exemplary punishment will become all the more commonplace as the US seeks to crush the deep-going and broad opposition of the Iraqi people to a savage colonial occupation.

  As is being said with increasing frequency and openness in the press, the prospect is for years, if not decades, of such bloodletting. The implications for the people of the Middle East and well beyond — not least, the American people — are incalculable and ultimately catastrophic.

• A Letter from an Iraqi Mother to the Mothers of the Americans Killed in Fallujah  (Also here.)

• Rahul Mahajan's Empire Notes — onsite reporting from Iraq, including:
  • Report from Fallujah — Destroying a Town in Order to "Save" it

    After we delivered the aid, three of my friends agreed to ride out on the clinic's remaining ambulance to no-man's land to retrieve the wounded. The ambulance — the only one left in this part of town, all the others having been destroyed by the Marines — already had three bullet holes from a US sniper through the front windshield on the driver's side. The previous driver was out of action; a US sniper's bullets had grazed his head not long ago. The clinic staff hoped that having English-speaking Westerners on board would allow the vehicle to retrieve more wounded. My friends made several trips in and out of no-man's land, and even spoke to the Marines. But on the last trip US sharpshooters blew out the vehicle's tires. My friends were forced to retreat, leaving a pregnant woman trapped in her house.

• Randolph T. Holhut: Mercenaries in Iraq: Outsourcing a corporate war

  The murder and mutilation of four employees of Blackwater Security Consulting in Fallujah on March 31 brought to light something that the Bush administration would rather you didn't know about — that it is outsourcing more and more of the occupation of Iraq to mercenaries.

• New Reports on U.S. Planting WMDs in Iraq (2004-04-12)

  Sources in Iraq speculate that occupation forces are using the recent unrest in Iraq to divert attention from their surreptitious shipments of WMD into the country. ... [The source added that] the White House in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has directly tasked the Defense Department to hide these weapons. Given the recent scandals to the effect that the U.S. president was privy to the 9/11 plot, they might try to immediately announce the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to overshadow the scandals and prevent a further decline of Bush's public opinion rating as the election approaches.

• Iraqi 'beaten to death' by US troops (2004-04-14)

  An Iraqi has died of his wounds after US troops beat him with truncheons because he refused to remove a picture of wanted Shiite Muslim leader Moqtada Sadr from his car, [Iraqi] police said today.

• Abu Spinoza: Iraq Occupation Policy Under John Kerry

  ... counting on John Kerry to bring peace to Iraq and the United States of America would be an incredible and foolish mistake with grave consequences for humanity.

• Sara Daniels: Voyage to the Country of Hate: From the Kuwait border to the "Sunni Triangle"

• Edward S. Herman: We Had To Destroy [Fill in Country Name] In Order To Save It

  By its heavy hand, and growing Iraqi recognition of its intention to dominate, the United States has stoked an insurgency that has been growing by leaps and bounds. The only Bush administration answer to this development is the application of more force. When applied to a revolt deeply rooted in the civilian population this means counterinsurgency war, with lavish use of deadly weapons, and therefore escalating civilian casualties. So, added on to an initial war of aggression we are now descending into a war of pacification. This will involve a further destruction of Iraq in order to save it — for Western ends and to save the Bush election campaign.

• Sidney Blumenthal: Hear no evil, read no evil, speak drivel

  Bush's [April 2004] press conference shows just how ill-informed he is about Iraq.

  A US President who can barely read. Why not install a horse as President? At least horses don't believe they are on a mission from God.

• John Pilger: Get out now (Too late — gone.)

  Invaders have ripped up the fabric of a nation that survived Saddam Hussein. This is a war of liberation and we are the enemy.

• Joe Vialls: Ryongchon — Nuclear Trigger for American Conscription?

  Although Iraq is where the conscripts are really needed, no sane American would accept the illegal invasion of Iraq as justification for conscription, because all have already worked out that this stupefying atrocity in the Middle East has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, and absolutely nothing to do with American national security. ...

  Because the photographs and other hard evidence in this report completely rule out an "accident" in Ryongchon, we are left with the harsh reality that one of the most important strategic locations in the whole of North Korea was deliberately nuked with a relatively low-yield weapon ...

  So it was against this backdrop of certain defeat in Iraq in the medium to long term, that the neocons had to ... trigger a large war in another part of the world, in order to initiate conscription in America to "Fight Communism", which in turn would be used to divert vast quantities of young Americans towards Iraq ...

• Michel Chossudovsky: Bush appoints a Terrorist as US Ambassador to Iraq

• Ron Jacobs: The Only Answer is Immediate Withdrawal

• Bill Van Auken: Mass opposition grows to Iraq war

• Linda S. Heard: The Hijacking of the 'War on Terror'

• Sidney Blumenthal: This is the new gulag

  Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union.

• Naomi Klein: Mutiny in Iraq  (Also here.)

• Joe Vialls: Vietnam's Operation Phoenix Reborn in Iraq

• UK forces taught torture methods

• Charley Reese: War Propaganda

  The government line is that if you don't approve of the war, you are disloyal. If you don't agree to give the Pentagon whatever it says it wants, you are disloyal. If you don't agree to surrender your civil liberties to the Patriot Act, you are disloyal. If you disagree with the Bush administration, you are disloyal. If you disagree with the chicken-hawk demagogues on radio and television, blathering about the war from the safety of their studios, you are disloyal.

  This entire glorification of war — as if the whole and only purpose of the government and the country were to fight wars — smells of fascism. The news media glorify the war and militarism; we get the same dose on television, in the movies and in video games. If the American people aren't careful, they will wake up one day to find out they've become a nation of mindless heel-clickers.

  America should not be about war. ...

• James Conachy: Iraqi city of Karbala left in ruins by US military

• List of coalition casualties

• Yet more photos of US brutality published

• Use of Dogs at Iraq Prison Was Authorized

• Make Art Not War  Hitler's brownshirt thugs reappear in San Francisco

• US guards 'filmed beatings' at terror camp

  Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp ...

• Beating Specialist Baker

• Brian Cloughley: America is Committing War Crimes in Iraq

• Rumsfeld OK'd plan for harsh interrogations

• Rumsfeld's soulmate at the heart of culture of brutality

  Amongst the approaches he [Major-General Geoffrey Miller] introduced [at Guantanamo] were "softening-up" techniques including sleep deprivation, extended isolation, simulated [i.e. near-]drowning [a form of torture used by the Gestapo] and forcing detainees to stand or crouch in "stress positions". ...

  That no-nonsense approach brought him to Rumsfeld's attention. ... In Miller, he saw a man after his own heart. ... Rumsfeld arranged for Miller to be seconded from Guantanamo to, as his orders put it, "review current Iraqi Theatre ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence".

• Seymour Hersch: The Gray Zone — How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib  (Also here.)

  According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

  Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, "Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding." The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld's testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, "Some people think you can bullshit anyone."

• Chris Floyd: Down by Law

  Think of it: the presidency, the Pentagon, the military, the mercenaries and the many secret armies, secret prisons and roving death-and-snatch squads run by the various U.S. intelligence agencies — all unleashed from any legal restraint, all operating outside "the normally observed laws of war." And all of it — the entire system of torture, abuse, atrocity and aggression — was ordered and approved and officially documented at the very highest level.

• John Stanton and Wayne Madsen: Torture Incorporated

• Report Documents Extensive U.S. War Crimes In Iraq

  The Bush Administration is committing war crimes and other serious violations of international law in Iraq as a matter of routine policy, according to a report released today by the Center for Economic and Social Rights.

• Glen Yeadon: Ambassador of Death, Right-Wing Death Squads, Drug Smuggling: George Bush's Plan for Iraq

• Jude Wanniski: Saddam Suddenly Looks Innocent — Why is He Being Held at All?

• Lawrence Mosqueda: An Advisory to US Troops: A Duty to Disobey All Unlawful Orders

  The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) 809.ART.90 (20), makes it clear that military personnel need to obey the "lawful command of his superior officer," 891.ART.91 (2), the "lawful order of a warrant officer", 892.ART.92 (1) the "lawful general order", 892.ART.92 (2) "lawful order". In each case, military personnel have an obligation and a duty to only obey Lawful orders and indeed have an obligation to disobey Unlawful orders, including orders by the president that do not comply with the UCMJ. The moral and legal obligation is to the U.S. Constitution and not to those who would issue unlawful orders, especially if those orders are in direct violation of the Constitution and the UCMJ.

• Michel Chossudovsky: Abandon the Battlefield!

• Jim Lobe: Iraq War Analysis Paints Grim Picture

  Citing a number of recent studies, the report ... notes that the $151.1 billion that will have been spent through this fiscal year could have paid for comprehensive health care for 82 million U.S. children or the salaries of nearly three million elementary school teachers. According to one study cited in the 54-page report, the war and occupation will cost the average U.S. household at least $3,415 through the end of this year.

• Edward Spannaus: Bush and Hitler: What The 'Torture Memos' Reveal

• Dr Susan Block: Bush's POW Porn

• William Rivers Pitt: Tuck Tail and Run

• Brian Cloughley: US Military in Crisis — Lies Upon Lies Upon Lies

  Who told the lies? Who ordered the lies to be told? Who, finally, is responsible for the lies having been told? Why did the US Army permit these lies to be told? Remember the West Point code of honor is not just that there is zero tolerance for those who "lie, cheat or steal" but that officers must not "tolerate those who do".

  The US Military is in crisis, from top to bottom. But the responsibility lies entirely at the top. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith must go. Only then can the cleansing begin.

• Alex Lefebvre: US press accounts confirm: Rumsfeld, Bush approved Iraq torture policy

  Recent press reports ... show that the very highest levels of the Bush administration — including President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld — set up programs designed to extract more information out of detainees by circumventing international laws banning torture. Moreover, they were fully conscious that in doing so they were violating US and international law and leaving themselves open to prosecution for war crimes.  ...

  The mounting evidence of a deliberate Bush administration policy to torture Guantanamo Bay — and subsequently Iraqi — detainees underscores the case for war crimes charges against all of the American high officials, civilian and military, responsible for the invasion and conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Myers, Cambone and others should all be placed in the dock.

• US General captured by Iraqi Resistance

• Voices in the Wilderness

• Joe Vialls: Covert Iraq-Iran Alliance Prepares to Destroy Zion

• Patrick J. Buchanan: Whose War?

  A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interest.

• Carlton Meyer: Abu Ghraib and the American Devolution

  So [in future] if a young soldier or high-level politician suggests they torture a prisoner in hope of getting information which may save lives, the man in charge must know to say: We are civilized and don't torture people.

  An implication, unstated in the article, is that, since the US has engaged in systematic torture in Iraq it is thus not (or rather, is no longer) a civilized country.

• UNCOVERED — the War on Iraq

  The film deconstructs the administration's case for war through interviews with U.S intelligence and defense officials, foreign service experts, and U.N. weapons inspectors ...

• Alex Salmond joins bid to have Tony Blair impeached

  Scottish Nationalist MP Alex Salmond has joined forces with Welsh Nationalists and two Conservatives MPs in an attempt to impeach Tony Blair claiming he mislead [sic] the country over the case for war with Iraq. ... [He] said: "It's quite clear that the Prime Minister misled, dissembled, he lied, to both Parliament and the country. ..."

• Financial Times, 2004-09-10: Time to consider Iraq withdrawal

  This week a macabre milestone was passed in Iraq. More than 1,000 American soldiers have now been killed since the US-led invasion of the country began nearly 18 months ago.  ... After an invasion and occupation that promised them freedom, Iraqis have seen their security evaporate, their state smashed and their country fragment into a lawless archipelago ruled by militias, bandits and kidnappers. ... But if they [US officials] are increasingly aware that what they have created in Iraq is a disaster, they seem at a loss to know what to do about it.

• Barry Grey: US media covers up American war crimes in Iraq

• Go to www.albasrah.net for many articles with information that you will never see in the mainstream American media.

• Mark Morford: Why Don't Americans Care? Do you know who Halliburton is? Dick Cheney? How about Karl Rove? Alas, most Americans don't.

• BBC, 2004-09-16: Iraq war illegal, says Annan

  The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has told the BBC the US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.

• Independent UK, 2004-09-16: Annan declares Iraq war illegal and warns of election credibility

• Patrick Martin: Mounting concern in US, Europe over Iraq debacle

• Naomi Klein: James Baker's Double Life: A Special Investigation

• Baghdad Burning  Girl Blog from Iraq...

• Chris Floyd: Dream Team  (Also here.)

• UK Guardian: Iraq had no WMD, report says

• Iraq WMD report proves Bush, Democrats lied to justify Iraq war

  [The] invasion of Iraq ... arose out of a policy pursued for over a decade, under three administrations, both Republican and Democratic. Such a decision is not a "mistake," as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry maintains. It is a monstrous crime: the criminal pursuit of a calculated policy, for which the entire US ruling elite must be held accountable.

• John Wilmerding: Wars are fought to keep oil under the dollar's control

  The U.S. economy today is a one-trick-pony, its only trick being its efficient machinery for killing people, a nation of predatory weapons of mass destruction. And we, the doves, are going to put them out of business.

• Al Jazeera: Report: Pentagon twisted pre-war data

  The Pentagon provided skewed pre-war analysis to back US President George Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein was allied with al-Qaida, say Democrats on the Senate armed services committee.

• Joe Vialls, 2004-10-20: British Troops to Die for America in Latifiyah

• Sunday Herald (Scotland), 2004-10-24: Chaos Inside The Triangle Of Death

• Army base 'has damaged Babylon'

• US occupation damages ancient sites at Babylon

• Haifa Zangana, The Guardian (UK), 2004-10-25: Chaos, murder and mayhem

  These atrocities go unrecorded. The dead are unnamed. There are indeed reasons for all this chaos, murder and mayhem. Those reasons lie in the nature of invasion, war and, most crucially of all, occupation. The US-led occupation forces presented themselves as champions of liberation, freedom and democracy. What they have achieved is chaos, collective punishment, assassinations, abuse and torture of prisoners, and destruction of the country's infrastructure.

• Rumsfeld attempts to duck accountability

  Rumsfeld was the most outspoken proponent of the theory that the war would be quick and clean, the number of troops needed would be limited, and costs would be low. Rumseld's response on Wednesday [2004-12-08, to a soldier's question about substandard equipment] made it sound like he and the president were responding to events beyond their control when the invasion was launched. In fact, they dictated the timing of the invasion and the preparedness of the forces.

• Eliot Weinberger: What I Heard about Iraq

• Stewart Nusbaumer: A Nation Rocked to Sleep

  Neocons drive the nation toward ruin, Iraqi guerrillas kill our soldiers, veterans are ignored, and Americans fall asleep.

• Entire US Column Wiped Out By Iraqi Resistance, and more war reports here.

• UK Guardian, 2004-10-29: 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, says study

• Abhay Mehta: The End Of Warfare

  Raw unopposed firepower has reached its limits. Never have so few battled against so many in face of overwhelming odds and brought a superpower to its knees. And the nightmare continues.

  It is indeed the greatest military victory in history. The self proclaimed mightiest empire that ever was, in fact, turns out to have had the shortest reign ever.

  This Empire met its match in the land between the two rivers.

  Translation for dumb Americans: The United States military machine is being defeated in Iraq, just as it was in Vietnam, and as the Soviet army was defeated in Afghanistan. It is now just a question of time and of how many tens of thousands of US soldiers are going to die, be maimed for life or go crazy, before the US is forced out, having got its ass well and truly kicked — again, as it well and truly deserves.

• SNAFU is an organization created to support resistance to an illegal and immoral war.  Join now.

• Giuliana Sgrena, 2004-11-23: Napalm Raid on Falluja?

• Story of Italian Hostage's Release Unclear

• What does Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena know and why did the U.S. want to kill her?

  Perhaps because she discovered that the Americans used chemical weapons in their attack on Falluja.

• Iraqi Physican Confirms US Chem Weapons Use In Fallujah

• Dahr Jamail: 'Unusual Weapons' Used In Fallujah

• Xymphora comments:

  Adding it all up, it appears that John Negroponte became aware that Giuliana Sgrena was leaving Iraq with dangerous information about what American forces had been up to in committing war crimes in Falluja. Negroponte's experience in Honduras gave him a certain expertise in covering up human rights violations, and he ordered his own personal bodyguard to assassinate Sgrena in a staged incident which was supposed to look like the usual problem at an American checkpoint in Iraq. The almost complete lack of damage to the car is inconsistent with the wild firing that is supposed to have happened, unless the Americans were intending to miss. The one shot that was supposed to count was the sniper shot to Sgrena, but that bullet was taken by Nicola Calipari. Had the shot hit Sgrena, we would never have heard about any of the details as the only witness who would have talked would be dead. It would simply be another unfortunate checkpoint incident, the Pentagon would have apologized, and all would soon be forgotten. No wonder the soldier said 'Oh shit!' To John Negroponte's many skills we can now add a new one: hit man.

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